


Friend of the Dead

by Feynite



Series: Looking Glass Kid!Fic AU's [3]
Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Looking Glass
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-06-01 17:26:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6529279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feynite/pseuds/Feynite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So, on my tumblr I got asked what might happen if Lavellan had via the wondrous convenience of inexplicable magic been sent back to ancient times as a fully ancient elvhen infant instead of her typical self. This lead to, essentially, three speculative plotlines wherein she was taken in and cared for by different people.</p><p>This is the filled prompts for the scenario wherein Lavellan was adopted by Dirthamen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dirthamen's Daughter

At first, Dirthamen does not understand the other evanuris’ objections to this arrangement. 

It is very practical. He can spare the minimal attention required to ensure his infant’s well-being without being distracted from matters at the meeting, and she behaves well. Generally, in fact, she seems quite content to simply observe events proceeding around her. When she becomes anxious or uncomfortable, she is more apt to simply shift around to get his attention; or else she will shove one tiny fist up by her mouth. In the beginning he had anticipated that she would sleep through most of these meetings. Most of his advisors had assured him that infants spent a lot of time sleeping.

But she seems too interested in the meetings to bother with that.

Gradually, though, Dirthamen understands that the problem is not with his infant at all. It is with her effect on the others. Falon’Din, of course, often complains that his ‘contraption’ is unsightly, and that the infant is a burden and that Dirthamen should not have her, and is overall surly on this matter. This is to be expected. He is very jealous of the attention being paid to her.

Andruil and June are mostly content to at least attempt to ignore her. But the others… Elgar’nan asks frequently to hold her. The few times Dirthamen has complied with his request, she behaved well - she is a very good baby, really, he thinks - but she became surrounded by a tiny cloud of anxiety that none of his father’s efforts could diminish, until he at last handed her back.

“I am surprised she did not cry,” Mythal had observed, and then asked for a turn. She had fared better than her husband. Though his infant had fidgeted more than usual, and had not settled into what he understood to be the typical reactions of babies towards Mythal; there had been no reaching for her hair or jewellery, or napping against her shoulder.

“Did she inherit Dirthamen’s oddness?” Sylaise wondered, and then his infant had been passed along, to her hands - and a similarly neutral reception - and Andruil’s, and more anxiousness. Andruil had swiftly passed the babe on to Ghilan’nain, who had taken a long moment to look into her eyes.

“I can hold her for the rest of the meeting,” Ghilan’nain had suggested.

Dirthamen had been slightly surprised to find himself more anxious at the prospect than his infant seemed to be.

It is this instance, and the continuing attention paid to his child, however, that yields the answer to the mystery. Bringing his infant to meetings is a poor idea, not because it will distract him, and not because she will disrupt important affairs, but because the other evanuris will, essentially, grind said affairs to a halt in order to make a fuss over the baby, and the baby’s reactions. When they realize she is looking at them, they will trail off mid-sentence, sometimes.

There are inadvertent benefits, though. On one occasion, when Falon’Din’s suggestions turned particularly violent, Mythal had promptly interrupted his brother.

“There are _children present,”_  she had said, meaningfully.

“Well perhaps there _should not be,”_  Falon’Din had countered.

In the subsequent argument, the matter had at last been put to a vote. All in favour of keeping the baby at the meetings were himself, Elgar’nan, Mythal, and Ghilan’nain. Elgar’nan, he suspected, was still stymied by the baby’s obvious anxiety towards him, and kept making efforts to win her over. Mythal just seemed to like babies. And Ghilan’nain, he rather thought, wanted to see if he might leave her behind after a meeting one time, and give her an opening to steal away the infant for herself. 

Dirthamen will be doing no such thing. He found her first, and she has no markings; the laws are fairly clear on his right to claim her.

His infant also raised her hand, but her vote did not count. Fortunately, though, it did not need to. With Mythal and Elgar’nan’s votes outweighing the rest, the baby was granted leave to stay. Falon’Din’s language and violence have been subsequently curtailed, and so, surprisingly, have June’s; though in the latter’s case, this seems to be some reflexive response on his own part, and nothing enforced by anyone else.

Overall, a success.

Dirthamen leaves the latest war council, and pauses to contemplate the infant strapped to his chest.

“Good baby,” he commends, patting her head.

Mythal breezes past him.

“Dirthamen, my son, if she does not have a name by the end of the month, I am giving her one myself,” she informs him.

“Will she be able to speak by the end of the month? Or write? I have tried giving her writing implements, but her fine motor skills are not developed enough to make proper use of them,” he explains. "It has been a hindrance towards learning her name.”

Mythal just shakes her head at him, a little, and sends a brush of fondness in his direction before carrying on.

He considers, and then gives his infant’s head another pat.

“A placeholder name would not offend you, I hope?” he wonders.

Big eyes blink up at him. She pats his chest, one time - ‘no’, then.

He nods.

“Good.”


	2. Meetings

Once Dirthamen’s baby grasps the beginnings of speech, it is not long before she more or less masters it. In some ways, her mouth seems disinclined to accommodate her, and she sometimes stumbles and trips over her words, or loses track of them. But for the most part, he is inclined to think that she speaks very well. Particularly around him. Around others, her nervousness increases, and she is less capable.

He finds this oddly satisfying. Pondering the matter, he can only conclude that it is a very blatant demonstration of her preference for him; and he finds he likes being preferred by his infant. Who gives the name ‘Lavellan’ for herself, once she is able to.

Well. Eventually. At first he mistakes it for ‘Dabedin’, but she is very keen on correcting both her own pronunciation and his understanding of it. She still uses the ‘one pat for ‘no’, two pats for ‘yes’’ system until most of the kinks have been ironed out; which happens roughly around the same time that she begins walking. Much as with speaking, the process of mastering her tiny legs is awkward, at first. She falls over frequently, and suffers fits of frustration with her physical limitations, it seems.

Council meetings are sometimes subjected to her personal practice time at this stage, as she has grown some, and Dirthamen is no longer able to hold her quite so comfortably. She is very quiet about requesting to be put down, and does not go where she should not, or interfere with anything as she totters around the meeting room. Still, eyes tend to track her passage. Conversation sometimes stutters to a halt while she is lowered, or falters if she trips.

On one memorable occasion, she tumbles into a plant pot. One of the large, crystal-filled basins in the corner of the room. Before Dirthamen can properly appreciate that something has happened, Mythal is on her feet, tsk’ing and fussing as she pulls his child away from the sharp crystals and flowing rivulets of water.

“She cut herself,” his mother tuts, checking her small hands.

“And no tears?” Andruil asks, raising an eyebrow. “Does the child not feel properly?”

“Perhaps she inherited my hardiness,” Elgar’nan suggests.

Falon’Din rolls his eyes.

“That would be a feat, considering you _adopted_  her father,” he asserts, sneering.

“I am your spiritual parent!” Elgar’nan insists, bellowing a bit. “Genetics are lowly and irrelevant! Your children will be my grandchildren; and Dirthamen’s child is my grandchild, just the same!” One of his fists smacks into the table, and then almost at once he looks at Mythal, and Dirthamen’s infant, and seems somewhat contrite.

But Lavellan only blinks at their commotion, and then down at her hands, and seems largely unperturbed. 

“Down?” she asks Mythal.

“No, little one. Not until we sort this out more safely,” Mythal declares, heading back to the table. Dirthamen holds out his arms, but his mother only assures him that is no better, and sits with his child herself for the rest of the meeting.

All that comes of it, though, is that the next time they meet, the room has clearly been made safe for tiny, questing children. And a small corner filled with soft toys has been supplied; though Lavellan does not spare them much attention, unless she is particularly bored.

As she masters the task of walking, her ability to speak with the rest of his family gradually improves as well. She is most quiet around Falon’Din, who is still badly jealous, and has done little to endear himself to her. She will talk a bit more to Mythal, and lately to Elgar’nan, too. And Sylaise can get her to speak, though she often chooses topics poorly; but then most of his family does. They ask her about colours and animals and toys, and pretty things, and clothes. They pay her compliments, but do not seem to expect her to say much of merit; and so her conversations with them remain largely brief, and unfocused.

Dirthamen has found that she is quite intelligent, however, and does no hesitate to mention as much when the subject arises. She has had many interesting thoughts to share with him on the political situations they discuss during meetings. Though for some reason, when he asserts as much, it prompts laughter.

“I am sure she has valuable input,” June says, with a grin, before changing the subject back to the current trade issues.

She has had, really. He looks down when he feels a tug on the side of his robes, and sees Lavellan looking expectantly up at him. He obligingly lifts her into his lap, and arranges her so that she can hear June speaking. This evening she will probably put much of the meeting into new perspective for him. Perhaps it comes of being so small, but she is very good at anticipating the needs of low-ranking people, and the impact of the war on their soldiers, and the cost of sacrifices on well-being and moral. Dirthamen has already suggested several policies based upon her suggestions, and implemented many more throughout his own ranks.

His baby really is quite smart.

It is a shame no one else seems to listen to her.


	3. Grandpa

“Baby,” Dirthamen announces.

“You are not calling your child _Baby,”_  Mythal immediately declares.

“It is only a placeholder name, until she is old enough to tell me her real one,” he explains, quite reasonably.

“The baby’s name is Fen’Harel,” his mother pronounces. “It is thematic, and appropriate.”

A cloud of overwhelming anxiety sweeps up from the tiny bundle at Dirthamen’s chest.

This time, his baby _does_  start crying. It is so rare for her to do so that everyone actually looks somewhat alarmed. Elgar’nan even stands from his seat.

“…No, I do not think she likes that one,” Dirthamen says, staring at her in consternation. He should offer comfort, he supposes. He tries jostling her somewhat, but it does not seem to work. Her cries echo through the chamber as Mythal looks taken aback, and worried; until at last Elgar’nan pulls the baby from Dirthamen’s chest sling, and presses her gently to his shoulder.

He begins humming. A low, soothing rumble.

“There, now, there,” his father says, rubbing the baby’s back. “Did something frighten you?”

It seems to be consternation, more than anything else, that has the baby’s cries ceasing. She looks at Elgar’nan. Elgar’nan, in turn, looks very pleased with himself, as he continues to soothe her.

“I think Baby is a suitable appellation, until Dirthamen settles on something more permanent. There is time, after all; let her simply be what she is,” his father asserts.

He holds his hands out for his baby back, but his father waves him off.

“I have her,” he insists, still radiating smugness.

Dirthamen marvels at his own lingering discomfort at no longer having her close, as his father resumes his seat, and the meeting turns to the next matter on the agenda.

 

~

 

Lavellan stares at Elgar’nan.

This is weird.

Everything is weird, of course, but this is particularly weird.

Elgar’nan extends the giant bowl of candy towards her, looking weirdly hopeful about this whole arrangement. They’re in one of the opulent lounge-type areas outside of the meeting rooms. Dirthamen left a few minutes ago to deal with something Falon’Din needed, and after a moment’s consideration and a brief consultation, had given her to Mythal. And Mythal had settler her onto a soft blanket and fetched her a few toys, and then Elgar’nan had come over.

With a giant freaking _tub_  of candy.

At least, Lavellan thinks it’s candy. It looks edible, and soft, and colourful. There are a lot of variety. For half a second she’d thought it was actually a tub of exotic beetles, but on closer inspection the unfamiliar foodstuffs look more like tiny versions of the sort of things that come out of Orlesian bakeries.

Came out of.

… _Will_ come out of.

Uh, or, would come out of in an alternate timeline.

She shakes her head a bit, and blinks up at Elgar’nan. Legendary God of Vengeance.

“Go ahead, princess,” he says. “Grandpa brought you treats!”

Mythal just looks amused.

Lavellan turns her gaze to regard the bowl again. What the heck should she even pick? There are like eight hundred different things in there. He doesn’t expect her to eat all of them, does he? Is that normal for ancient elven babies? That bowl is bigger than _she_  is.

But Elgar’nan is clearly waiting, and she doesn’t really want to know what he’ll do if she ignores him, so finally she reaches out and grabs… something. When she pulls back, ‘grandpa’ is smiling, and she has something that looks sort of like a pink and white acorn in her hands. She gets it into her mouth, and finds it tastes mostly like fresh berries and cream.

Not bad.

“See? Grandpa is fun!” Elgar’nan says, beaming.

To her profound relief, Dirthamen comes back then.

 

~

 

Elgar’nan has an ‘off’ switch.

Well.

Kind of.

Lavellan learns this when she is about three years old - the first time he really loses his temper in front of her. She’s seen him reign it in before, so she knows it’s there. A simmering rage that sometimes escapes him in aborted bellows and gestures that are swiftly retracted when the evanuris glances at her, and seems to suddenly recall that she exists and that shouting in front of children is bad form or something.

So when he finally blows his top, it’s simultaneously a surprise, and not a surprise. She’s sitting in Dirthamen’s lap, looking over his notes and wondering about the distribution of water through elvhen cities, when the conversation between Elgar’nan and June finally reaches some kind of breaking point. It makes her wish she’d been paying more attention, as she looks up at the sudden flurry of shouts. ‘Insolence’ and ‘stupidity’ and ‘worthlessness’ are brought up, but she misses a lot of what Elgar’nan says in the storm of his temper.

It’s a little alarming.

It’s many times _more_  alarming when Mythal suddenly reaches over, plucks her out of Dirthamen’s lap, and deposits her into Elgar’nan’s.

Elgar’nan, who is fiery and shouting and has literal flames burning in his eyes. The once-god of vengeance, who, admittedly, tends to fuss over her and gives her candy and call her ‘princess’ a lot, but who is still decidedly overwhelming and dangerous in a lot of ways.

She maybe freaks out a little.

The air around her sparks with fear, and Elgar’nan abruptly cuts off like a snuffed candle. He looks down at her and immediately the ranting stops. The flames die, and he puts his arms around her, snuggling her close and patting her head.

“No, no,” he coos. “Do not be afraid, little one. My temper is not for you. You are safe. Grandpa has you. Nothing scary is happening.” 

Lavellan has no idea how to respond to this. She settles for just sort of going with it, after a moment; letting the fear ebb out of her. At least he’s pretty warm, and she more or less believes him when he insists that he doesn’t have any designs on killing her vulnerable child self. At least, not right away.

After a few minutes, the meeting carries on. Elgar’nan continues his argument with June in a more reasonable tone. She shoots a displeased look at Mythal. Who, in turn, seems quite satisfied with arrangements.

Elgar’nan has an ‘off’ switch.

And she’s it.


	4. Bath Time

There are a great many surreal difficulties that come of being a baby.

Needing to be fed. Needing to be carried. Needing to be dressed, and cleaned. Not being able to express herself clearly. It’s rather like being horribly injured, really.

If there is one thing she is very glad of in Elvhenan, however, it is the matter of self-cleaning clothes. As soon as she’s mobile enough she fully intends to stop soiling herself, no matter _how_  much effort it takes; but in the meanwhile, she was both surprised and exceedingly glad to realize that ancient elven baby clothes cleaned up the mess themselves. Some enchantment or another, she thinks. She can see why the elves might invest a certain degree of effort into innovating such a thing; and even in light of all that’s happened so far, she really, really doesn’t know what to do with the thought of an evanuris cleaning up her… well.

Even if Dirthamen is… not what she might have expected.

Still. Even though diapers are less of an issue than she would have feared, apparently ancient elves are firm believers in frequent bathing - and babies are not exempt from this standard.

She is tiny and naked and mostly just drawing a mental blank as Dirthamen carefully lowers her into the basin of water. It’s a small, gentle fountain, basically; she wouldn’t quite call it a sink. It almost looks more like a decorative feature, but it’s in a bathroom, and the water is warm; and she has the sneaking suspicion it might have been made specifically for this.

The water is clear, but a few large, rainbow-hued bubbles rise up from it anyway. She watches them for a moment, and then looks at Dirthamen. The lighting in the room is very soft. It’s somewhat at odds with the evanuris’ dark clothing, and inscrutable mask. She watches uncertainly as he lifts up a damp cloth, and starts gently brushing her with it.

He’s… very careful, she notes. He makes sure the cloth isn’t sopping before he runs it over her head, and wipes at her cheeks and nose. When she blinks at him, he pauses, as if thinking of something; and then he looks around, and after a moment, turns to pull down a basket from a nearby shelf. Reaching in, he produces a small, strange-looking object. It’s shaped like a star, but it’s soft. Like it’s full of gel. Luminescent little balls are all lined up inside of it, and brighten as Dirthamen holds it in front of her, and then gives it a demonstrative shake. Then he hands it to her.

“I am sorry. I forgot the toy,” he says. 

She closes her clumsy hands around the star. It’s actually… weirdly reassuring to have something to hang onto, as Dirthamen goes back to bathing her. She has the strangest urge to shove it in her mouth; but she manages to resist the inexplicable temptation. Instead she just squishes it a bit, and holds it in both hands to give it an experimental shake when the lights start to dim. They brighten up again.

Dirthamen pats her head.

It’s weird.

It’s really, really weird.

But she supposes, on balance, that it could be worse.


	5. Fighter

When Dirthamen’s daughter is five years old, he finds her sitting in a corridor underneath an open window, crying.

It is a surprisingly distressing thing, when she cries. Even when he has no notion of the context for her tears. Perhaps especially then, in fact. Dirthamen walks towards her. She is battling with her feelings, it seems; reigning in her emotions, as she has begun to do, in a manner which makes him think of harrowing duels with unrelenting opponents.

He kneels in front of her. It is better to kneel, so that she does not need to crane her neck up to look at him.

“Why are you crying?” he asks. She has scraped her knee, but that small injury would not normally prompt tears from her. A simple touch, and the wound is closed. But the misery remains.

Lavellan shakes her head.

“I do not know what I am supposed to do,” she admits, tearfully. Her voice shakes, and her words would likely be less-than-comprehensible to someone who has not spent years learning the particulars of her speech patterns. “I do not know why I am like this. What he sent me here for. I need to go, to… to find out, but I do not… I do not know what I am supposed to do!”

An old and ugly wound twists through Dirthamen. For an instant, then, it is not his child in front of him, but his brother. Falon’Din’s new face looks at him in anguish. 

_I do not know what I am supposed to do!_

A lack of purpose is a dangerous thing. Confusion over it doubly so. Dirthamen blinks, and looks back at the small form of his child. Tear-streaked and overwhelmed with strange, fractured emotions. It seems even those born to the complications of bodies and more diverse forms can fall prey to this doubt. This damning apprehension.

“You need do nothing,” he says. “You exist. That is purpose enough.”

She shakes her head, and bats at the tears on her cheeks.

“I cannot let it happen again! I cannot let… but I do not know what to do… it is all so strange, and wrong,” she chokes, dragging in a shuddering breath only to let it loose with more sobs.

Dirthamen does not know what to make of it. It feels as though she is mirroring his own thoughts. Perhaps she is? Perhaps some sliver of his own unease has crept into hers, and mingled there together, confusing them both? He does not know. The air is ripe with despair and frustration. The impending sense that something terrible and inevitable is bound to happen. Like watching a great wave build and build, and knowing that it must, eventually, reach the shore.

A grim anticipation.

He is still contemplating it when suddenly his arms are full.

His child holds him with the same ferocity with which she restrains herself. She buries her face against his chest, and her tiny body shakes, as if her spirit is contesting with the limitations of the Waking world itself. 

“I am sorry,” she says, and then repeats. “I am sorry, I am sorry, I do not know how to fix this, I do not know what I should do, I am so sorry. Please, please, I do not want it all to happen again.”

She is very afraid.

Dirthamen closes his arms around her, and lifts her to him like she is too small to walk on her own again. Like she is still small enough to attend his council meetings.

“Tell me what you are afraid of,” he instructs. Adults are meant to handle their children’s problems for them; and he finds himself anxious to rid her of her fears, and see the air around her calm, and her sorrows abate. Peace. That would be best, he thinks.

She shudders, and after a moment, leans fully against him.

“The future,” she says.

Ah.

Dirthamen cannot destroy the future. It does not seem advisable to attempt it, anyway. Likely, it would cause more problems than it solved, even in terms of his child’s fears. Nor can he grant her some false purpose, for that would risk turning her into a mockery of herself; and he would not see that happen to her.

“I will help you face the future,” he promises, because that is what he may promise.

It does seem to have some effect, at least. After a few moments, Lavellan calms further. Her distress - or rather, the urgency of it - eases. Her breaths grow more even, though she makes no request to be put down; and Dirthamen finds he is reluctant to let her go, for the moment. It has begun to occur to him, as she gets larger, that one day she will not be so easy to lift and carry and keep close; and perhaps there will come a time when he will long to be able to do this again.

“I want to save you,” she whispers to him.

“From what?” he wonders. There are many potential dangers in the world, after all.

She pats him, once, and shakes her head; and will say no more on this subject.

 

~

 

When she is seven, his daughter requests a sword.

She is already the proud owner of two knives and a small wooden shield. Dirthamen has seen her at practice with the items in question. Her targets are often imaginary, or else the pillars in her bedchambers suffer beneath her blows. She is very good, he thinks, considering her age. She does not flourish much, or move without purpose, or make a great show of her activities. Likely most swordmasters would find her form appalling; but it seems very pragmatic to him. Apart from her occasional bouts of clumsiness, of course. Her body, it seems, does not always comply with her intentions.

“I do not know if the pillars in your room can withstand abuse from an actual sword,” he muses.

“Then I would like a practice dummy as well,” she reasons, peering up at him from across the reports on his desk. There is a lot of tedium to running a territory. He is glad for her help in that regard; she is very good at resource distribution, and has learned quickly how to forge his sigil, to fill out necessary reports and make certain that pressing matters are not unduly delayed by his distractions or lack of mind for them. He would worry over that, but he finds he trusts her judgement.

For example, she could requisition whatever she wishes, with or without his permission, considering her aptitude for forgery. And yet she is very careful to ask for things before she takes them. More mindful than most of his high-ranking followers, in fact.

“Very well,” he agrees. “I shall obtain a sword and practice dummy for you.”

She thanks him, and goes back to her own, much smaller desk in the corner of the room. His followers find it very ‘quaint’, how she sits and ‘pretends’ to work with him. He does not know where they gathered the impression that pretences were involved, but it seems a pervasive opinion. Every so often one of them will come and insist upon taking his daughter out to do something else. This is good; Dirthamen often loses track of time, and his child is unskilled at recollecting the need for play on her own. But she always submits to it with a certain degree of aggravation.

She does not care much for being talked down to, he suspects. Though it is to her benefit to be underestimated.

Today, though, it is Sa’adahl who opens the door to his study, and beckons Lavellan to come and attend. Dirthamen looks up and pauses. Sa’adahl is one who sends information to his brother. She is very shrewd and cutting, and lacks sentiment. He finds he is uneasy at the prospect of letting his child be alone with her. Falon’Din has been quiet on the subject of her existence lately, but it is unlikely he has forgotten it, or truly moved past caring.

After a moment, he calls Fear through the Dreaming, and sends it winging out the door behind the pair. The great raven watches, and he sees through its eyes even as he turns his own gaze back to his reports; and sees also Deceit, in the far reaches of its own mission, scouting the mountains to the south.

Through Fear’s eyes he sees, too, that his daughter has tucked one of her knives into her belt; and her hand strays to it, whenever Sa’adahl gets to close.

She is a sharp child.

But she is still _a_ child. Sa’adahl will have to be sent away, he concludes.

 

~

 

When his child is twelve, he loses her for the first time.

In the evening he bids her good night, and in the morning, she is gone from her chambers. No matter how he searches, he cannot find her. Nor can he fathom where she might have gone, or how she could have been taken from her rooms without his knowing.

His distress is a palpable thing. He longs to have her back, and he finds this longing is no one he endures well at all. It occurs to him that perhaps she has vanished as easily as she once came to him. That she could be gone, just like that; and the thought feels him with ice. It makes him jagged, and afraid.

She is gone for three days. She returns on the fourth, emerging from the depths of a maze he made several months ago. One of his followers is with her; slumped in exhaustion and dehydration, and Dirthamen recalls at once that he had been tasked with freeing himself as punishment for some transgression or another, and then promptly forgotten about. His daughter pulls the man along. She has her sword, and her new shield, and her fine clothes are torn in places and scorched it others. Her face is streaked with mud and blood; but she is smiling. Sharp, fierce and triumphant, as she comes to a stop before him.

“Sorry, my lord,” she says. “I did not mean to be gone so long. But some stray spirits told me he would not last much longer.” So saying, she nods to his follower, who looks faint and unsteady.

The man lets go of her to fall to his knees.

“Forgive me, Wise and Benevolent Dirthamen!” he pleads. “I would never have endangered your child, I swear it! I begged her to turn back, a thousand times!”

Lavellan folds her arms.

“He escorted me out. It was very kind of him,” she asserts.

Dirthamen suffers no delusions on who escorted whom from the maze. But he finds his relief is too overwhelming to spare much mind for anything else. Though his eyes and his magic alone can verify her state - cuts and bruises, and dirt, and nothing more - he finds he cannot stop himself from striding forward. Nor from pressing her into his arms. It seems he must hold her to verify that she is indeed present, and alive, and unharmed.

She stiffens. Hesitates for a moment, but then her arms close around him, as well.

“Did I worry you?” she wonders.

“Yes,” he admits. He finds it is difficult to say anything more. His throat feels too thick for words, and the inside of his mask is damp. He keeps hold of his child until she insists that someone come to tend the injuries of the follower she retrieved. Even then, he sets his ravens to the task, and keeps one hand upon her shoulder.

“Next time, you should come to me,” he tells her.

“To get you to let the prisoner out, or to tell you where I am?” she wonders. “Because I actually enjoyed the challenge a bit.”

Dirthamen considers this.

“Come to tell me where you are,” he decides.

He understands the need for challenge. For goals.

She needs an instructor, he decides. Several, perhaps, to improve these skills she seems to favour. And he will devote more time to helping her master her magic. It would suit him to, he thinks.

He would not care to lose track of her again.


	6. Elandaris

Lavellan is twenty-eight years old when she meets Elandaris.

She is staying at Mythal’s palace, ostensibly for family bonding, education, and refinement, but she kind of thinks Mythal is mostly trying to figure out how to make her work with the current power structures that are guiding elvhen society. Not that it’s bad. She finds herself worrying over matters in Dirthamen’s territory in her absence, but he sends her reports, and they still confer via dreams and ravens, and she knows it’s not like everything will just fall apart without her.

Mythal’s got a lot of airy gardens, and interesting people around. As ever, she finds herself keeping an eye out for a certain familiar face; but that one doesn’t make an appearance. The spirits are plentiful, and generally friendly. So are the people. Many of them seem incomprehensibly excited at having ‘Mythal’s young granddaughter’ among them, though she has no idea why. That’s pretty par for the course, though; people are just weird around her.

Mythal’s followers also don’t really know what to make of her combat practice. She tears through most of their training dummies, until one of the ranking people - Then-something - actually gets her some decent equipment, and a good spot to use it in.

She’s used to having an audience for her morning practice, so at first, she doesn’t think much of feeling eyes on her back.

“Now that is just unfair,” a deep voice drawls.

Pausing, Lavellan glances towards the source.

The elf is one of the higher ranking followers in Mythal’s service. He’s elegant as most of them, with short, pale brown hair nearly the same shade as his skin, and black markings trailing across the long angles of his face. Elandaris, she thinks is his name.

“What is?” she wonders.

“You,” he says. “I look at you, and I can scarcely believe you have less than a hundred years to you. And yet you are only twenty-eight. It makes me feel guilty for finding you so pretty. Hardly seems fair.”

Lavellan looks at Elandaris a bit more fully.

And what was that supposed to be, she wonders? Flirtation? A piss-poor attempt at it, she thinks. As if she should feel bad for being the age she unavoidably (and she knows how unavoidable, truly) is, or looking how she does.

“Then stop looking at me,” she advises.

With a hard look, she turns back to her practice dummy.

Elandaris lets out a low whistle.

~

She runs into him again a few days later, in Mythal’s library. She’s found a quiet corner to answer some letters from Dirthamen, and several of his resource managers. Ordinarily she’d use the desk in her room, but she wanted to check some agricultural references; and so she has relocated to a small, shady corner, with a stack of books on one side and a stack of letters on the other.

“Now, this  _is_  exceedingly unfair, you must admit,” a low, distinctive voice drawls.

Looking up, she sees Elandaris standing across from her little table. 

“What?” she wonders.

The elf gestures expansively towards her and her work.

“The other day I see you pummelling the stuffing out of a practice dummy, and now I see you working away at the intellectual’s task. What next?” Elandaris demands. “Have you mastered a few dozen instruments? Learned several hundred styles of dance? Do you paint, forge, and sculpt? Are you an accomplished singer and acrobat?”

Lavellan raises an eyebrow.

“You object to skills?” she asks, dryly.

“I object to beautiful, talented women who are only twenty-eight,” Elandaris says, letting out a long sigh. “I feel like a cradle-robber, sighing over you.”

“Then go sigh over someone else,” she says.

The elf presses a hand to his chest.

“And she is so cold!” he protests.

Turning away, she ignores him, and his persistent sighing, and focuses on the task at hand.

~

She is consulting with one of Dirthamen’s ravens - Fear - when Elandaris approaches her again. They’re outside, in one of the larger gardens. Fear is tangled up in the branches, more in the Dreaming than out of it; barely more than a shimmer of indistinct feathers to the untrained eye. She is in the middle of describing her day when a voice breaks in from behind her.

“Talking to the birds?” Elandaris asks. “Or is there a spirit up a tree?”

Turning, she glances towards the irritating elf.

“What do you want?” she asks, curtly.

Elandaris smiles.

“Oh, she bites and lashes out with claws so cold,” he laments. Then he pulls a hand out from behind his back, and produces a small bouquet of pristine white flowers. “I know I should not, but I saw these flowers and they made me think of you. So pure and lovely and small. Though it makes me feel like a cad, please, let me give them to you?”

She stares.

Pure, lovely, and small?

And more with this guilt business? The flowers don’t even look like… much of anything, really. They look sort of like blank canvases, in fact; like someone took a model labelled ‘generic flower’ and then forgot to colour it in.

“Let me spare you the torment,” she drawls. “No. Go away.”

“Please,” Elandaris asks. He moves closer, still, and holds out the flowers, his expression dropping into a pleading look. The air around him shimmers with oily unhappiness.

“I am not interested,” she says, firmly.

“There is not presumption on my part. I only wish to give you flowers; will you not have mercy on me?” the elf persists.

“I do not care for your flowers,” she tells him.

Somehow, though, that just seems to perk him up instead of further dissuading him.

“Then tell me what kind you would like,” he asks. “Name a type. I will get them for you.”

“I thought you were only giving me those flowers because they made you think of me so,” she says, raising an eyebrow.

“Ye…es,” Elandaris concedes, with a nod, and just the barest flash of impatience. “But now it has become a point unto itself. I can see that I have done something to offend you. Let me make amends. Tell me the flowers you like, and I will memorize them for you. I shall imprint them upon my mind, next to the image of your pristine loveliness, and perhaps wait for a day when your heart has thawed and my admirations are less rife with guilt.”

Lavellan turns back towards the tree.

“I do not like flowers,” she says.

Impatience flares again.

“Then what  _do_  you like?” Elandaris demands. “What draws the eye of Dirthamen’s spoiled, callous child? Shall I plate myself in gold, and prostrate myself before you, or would you declare the shine of my gilded back insufficient?”

And there it is. The petty wretch, infuriated that his clumsy attempts at manipulation and overtures have fallen short of the mark.

“I apologize for being unimpressed by your utter insincerity,” she says, not bothering to look back at him.

She jumps, slightly, as something smacks across the back of her shoulders.

A glance down reveals that the bouquet of white flowers is at her feet.

“Stuck up wretch,” Elandaris mutters.

~

She does not see him again for several days, which doesn’t surprise her. Hopefully, she thinks, he’s given up, and left her in peace. 

And then the murmurs start up. It takes her a while to get the full story, as most everyone in the palace seems set on coddling her, but at length she learns that Elandaris had gone to sleep the evening after their ‘conversation’ in the garden, and has not woken since.

Apparently, Mythal had planned to have ‘words’ with him on a subject which nearly no one will talk about in earshot of her, and is therefore probably herself. Some people some to think that Elandaris is lingering in dreams on purpose and hoping to wait out Mythal’s ire. But apparently, even Mythal cannot wake him; which is unusual, as Elandaris isn’t known as a particularly skilled dreamer.

She has her own suspicions.

That night, when she goes to sleep, she finds Dirthamen.

He has only one foot in the Dreaming; but not long after she appears, he slides into it more fully, and greets her. The dream they’re in is comprised of long, woodland shadows, and steep cliffs, and the distant, passing outlines of birds.

“Did you do something to Elandaris?” she asks, without any preamble. Dirthamen doesn’t really care for preamble anyway.

He tilts his head, mask silvery today, and after a moment, nods in confirmation.

“What did you do?” she asks.

“I sent him on a trip,” Dirthamen replies. “He needed to learn some things.”

She lets out a sigh.

“He is Mythal’s follower; if she figures it out, she will be angry,” she points out.

Dirthamen considers this.

“Unlikely,” he decides.

She raises an eyebrow.

“Unlikely for her to figure it out, or unlikely for her to be angry when she does?” she wonders.

“I am allowed to defend my child,” Dirthamen says. “He had ugly dreams. If Mythal is upset, I will show them to her. She can have one of my people if he does not survive, as payment for the transgression. That will appease her; secretly she will be glad that he is gone.”

“Ugly dreams?” she wonders.

“Yes. Not fit for children,” he says.

She folds her arms.

“I am not a child anymore,” she points out. Never really has been. Not in this lifetime.

“You are  _my_  child,” Dirthamen counters.

Then he does that thing, where he sends her drifting into peaceful, quiet dreams; too relaxed and disconnected from her conscious thoughts to bother interrogating him any further.

When she blinks herself awake, she sighs.

 _Good luck, asshole,_  she thinks at Elandaris.


	7. Growing Up

It is some years after she is deemed too old to keep attending council meetings, before she is deemed old _enough_ to attend them again.

She is nearing her hundredth year in this life when the matter is raised again, and there is a surreal quality to her existence that keeps striking her at odd moments. Part of her mind insists that she should be on the cusp of finishing her life. By the standards of Elvhenan, however, it’s still barely begun. She’s older than any elf she ever knew in her time, and she’s still treated as barely adult in this one. It’s… hard. Harder still when so much time has passed and she’s not even sure what she’s meant to be doing with it.

Dirthamen helps. Or tries to, anyway. In dreams he weaves twisting paths for her to follow in moments of intense contemplation. And his ravens bring her memories. Stray thoughts, of elves thousands of years old. Memories belonging to ancient beings when they were only just nearing their first century. They introduce her to brand new spirits, and to long aged ones, settled as deep within the Fade as she can go.

It does shift her perspective somewhat. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, and sometimes just by turning it sideways to no discernable effect, other than to give her a new direction to consider things from.

Dirthamen’s good at that.

But it’s Mythal who deems her ready to begin attending the meetings again. Who first requests her presence, and awards her a seat next to Dirthamen, rather than the usual post a high-ranking follower might take behind him. She almost wishes she could stand at his shoulder instead, the way that Turmoil and Halvarel do, and look out over the proceedings and not draw so much attention herself. But declining Mythal’s honour isn’t really an option, and she supposes she should be used to having more attention than she’d like by now.

Elgar’nan spends half the meeting asking her questions about her studies and doting awkwardly, in that fashion of his that she’s mostly grown accustomed to, by now. It does make her feel strange, again, though. More than a hundred years old, and still treated like a child. Even if she is given far, far more freedom and autonomy by Dirthamen himself than most one hundred year olds, by far.

She’s quiet for most of the first meeting. Halvarel has her wear a circlet with a single, jewelled eye in the center of it, and dresses her in the same colours as Dirthamen. Her adoptive parent himself is quiet for most of the meeting, settled like a buffer between her and Falon’Din’s people, while Fear and Deceit roost in the Fade just beyond sight. No one seems to expect a great deal of commentary from either of them, though Mythal does occasionally solicit her opinion.

Her ‘grandmother’ has come to expect a certain degree of insight from her. Still, she is cautious in extending too much. It’s often surmised that she takes after Dirthamen in dreaminess, and as the years have dragged by, and her searches have proven fruitless, and her mind has drifted in its seeking through stranger and stranger parts of the Dreaming, she hasn’t been entirely sure that it’s an inaccurate assessment. Dirthamen has filled her life with puzzles and trials and his own odd sort of helpfulness. The surreal quality of her situation has been easier to embrace, on the whole, than the grief of it.

She doesn’t wear a mask the way he does, but she’s learned to mask herself just the same.

When the meeting adjourns for refreshments, Mythal approaches them. She takes Lavellan’s chin in her hand and looks into her eyes, compliments her and pats her cheek, eyes calculating in that way they always are. Trying to see the mystery; but also accepting, on some level, that a little mystery must go hand-in-hand with being Dirthamen’s daughter.

“Have you been looking after yourself, my dear?” she asks.

“Of course,” Lavellan replies.

“And your father, too?”

Lavellan inclines her head. So does Dirthamen, for that matter. It’s normally supposed to be a bit of a joke, when the child is tasked with caring for their parent. But Dirthamen, she’s found, is a strange sort, and needs caring. Much in the same sense that Cole had, really. It’s not that he’s inept or fragile or incapable of handling himself. More that he’s lonely and disconnected.

Decades have stretched her, somewhat, between the point where Dirthamen resides – though she never quite reaches his same level – and the solidity of the rest of the world.

She feels like a bridge.

She thinks, perhaps, that if he was less of a colossal piece of shit, then Falon’Din might sometimes feel the same way. There are days when she wonders if his general awfulness might not be attributed to some of that feeling. But on most such days, she’s usually left with the conclusion that, no. He’s just a terrible person, all around.

“I think we should have you at more of these meetings,” Mythal says. “It is always good to get a fresh perspective. A more youthful one. It is too easy, in the course of ruling and deliberating, to lose sight of what effects those with more immediate concerns.”

“I can think of better representatives of the immediate concerns of Elvhenan than myself,” Lavellan replies, in carefully neutral tones.

“So you have noted in many of your suggestions,” Mythal replies, an amused curl to her lips. She seems more pleased than insulted, though. “Our family penchant for leadership remains strong. Perhaps, in this case, it is even stronger in skipping a generation. I would almost expect your father to suggest sending you to these meetings in his stead; though of course, such a notion would be declined.”

Dirthamen wouldn’t suggest that, Lavellan knows. It would entail leaving her to deal with Falon’Din. And while she’s fairly certain she _can_ deal with her ‘uncle’, the man’s hatred of her has only grown, year by year. The discord such an arrangement would inspire would be substantial.

“I would never presume,” is what she says, though.

Coming up from behind Mythal, Sylaise chuckles.

“Darling child, of course you would,” she says, before moving in to claim a hug, and tut over Lavellan’s styling. “Ruling is in your nature. It is in all of our natures. We are born to it; and there is a burden in that. But no shame at all.”

Born to it.

Right.

She manages to resist the urge to be ‘insolent’, and instead merely inclines her head in acceptance.

The truth she’s come to, more or less, is that she’s here. She was dropped on Dirthamen’s doorstep, and left to build these strange ties to the would-be gods of her people. To the beings who fed into the destruction of her world. There’s no sight nor sign of Solas, no hint of what in particular he meant for her to do. If this was his plan, though, she can only surmise that she is meant to act through her positioning here. To seize the power she can, and use it to dismantle the dangers that might destroy this world.

His world.

Even if he is not in it.

Even if he destroyed hers to regain it.

“I should like to attend more meetings,” she admits. “There is much to be learned from watching those with greater experience.”

“It is an insult,” Falon’Din sneers, striding forward, with a few of his own poor followers at his heels. He looks at her the same way someone might look at a dog that had just befouled their favourite carpet. “A child, sitting at a council table as if we have once again reduced grand and pressing matters to a game for toddlers.”

“A hundred years carries one well past toddlerhood, _Uncle,”_ Lavellan replies, even as Dirthamen moves between them.

“Speak to me of maturity when you have thousands of years of living done, and the blood of a hundred souls for each one of them standing in tribute to your greatness,” Falon’Din counters.

Her blood boils.

“What futile tribute they have served,” she returns.

Falon’Din’s expression goes livid.

“You insolent-”

“Enough,” Mythal snaps, firmly. She looks at Lavellan in brief rebuke, before turning to her eldest son. “My dear. We have been over this. Goading your young niece is beneath you, and her inclusion in these ceremonies is a matter of overall familial well-being.”

“I should think excluding her would serve us better,” Falon’Din insists.

“Brother. That is enough focus on my child. Come and speak with me, instead,” Dirthamen requests, standing more fully between the two of them. Falon’Din grumbles somewhat still, but after a few moments and a few more pointed, distasteful looks in Lavellan’s direction, Dirthamen is able to draw him off with Mythal’s help. The three of them move to a separate part of the chamber. Halvarel goes with Dirthamen, whilst Turmoil stays with her.

Fear settles upon the brightly-lit rafters overhead. A dark shadow of wings amidst gleaming crystals.

Sylaise snorts.

“Falon’Din’s opinion on these things does not count for much. I expect we will be seeing more of you, and I am glad for it. Perhaps we will even be able to find you something appropriate to wear next time,” her aunt extends, throwing another disparaging look over Lavellan’s appearance. Though this seems less vitriolic than Falon’Din’s, at least, and more disdainful of the fabrics and colours currently adorning her. “In a bright and optimistic future, I might even hope you could influence your father to being dressing properly, too.”

Lavellan would protest, but for one thing, it would be futile, and for another, Dirthamen is currently wearing about six different belts for reasons even she can’t quite make sense of. So it’s not as if Sylaise doesn’t have something of a point.

She just doesn’t care very much _about_ her point.

“Halvarel has been coordinating our outfits of late. You might have a chance of convincing things to go in reverse,” she concedes.

Sylaise grins.

“Tempting, child. You should come and stay with me awhile, after all these proceedings are done. Let me show you how to present yourself as a leader should. Carry it over to your father, and we might have the makings of something worthwhile between us. It would be good for Dirthamen’s people to see their leader as something more than an inscrutable shadow.”

Lavellan suspects it would, at that. But when she agrees, it’s more for the opportunity to get a better handle on Sylaise, than to permit the reverse to happen.

In the back of her mind, her hundred-year-old self wonders how long they will all keep calling her ‘child’ for.

~

Five hundred years turns out to be around the upper limit of it, in fact.

Lavellan spends a few years living with Sylaise, and watches the evanuris conduct herself through the city and its grandeur, and learns how she does what she does. She attends meetings, and it’s really rather easy to get Dirthamen to start gradually changing his style; wearing neater, prettier things. She helps him paint swirling patterns on his mask. He doesn’t see the point in it, but she asks him to do it anyway; and that seems to be a good enough motivation to get him to do a whole lot of things, really.

“It would make you happy?” he asks her.

“It would,” she says, and smiles.

In the dark hollows of his mask, he blinks, and acquiesces.

They still stick with the ‘mysterious’ motif, though. In part because it’s a bit inescapable, and in part because that’s simply what fits with Dirthamen’s place among his peers. The evanuris’ symbolic roles are settled into their dynamics, she finds. The mother, the father, the mystery, the shepherd of the dead, the hearthkeeper, the innovator, the explorer, the hunter…

Sometimes she worries about the seat she’s been given to fill, in light of that.

A hundred years. Hundreds more. She digs through dreams and prods at the firmament of an ancient world, and sometimes she feels like a dream herself. Like she isn’t really here at all. Like she can’t be. When she’s five hundred, she crosses paths with a gleaming spirit that stretches vastly beyond itself. It’s bright, like a shard of the sun has broken off and split its way through the Dreaming. What she sees, she thinks, is only the barest fragment of it. It stands, radiant and vast, and warm, and in her eyes it looks like what she’d once dreamed the Creators might, when she was young enough to still have faith.

It brings her to her knees.

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispers, in her dead language of unborn ghosts. “I’m not a god. And neither are they. Neither was he. I don’t know what path we’re on, or how to redirect it. I don’t know. I’m just flailing at the sky again, no matter what I do.”

The Spirit of Glory looks towards her.

“Find greatness,” it says. “Help others find theirs. When all are at their best, the world shines, and hope flourishes.”

A warm hand brushes her own, and then is gone. The spirit retreats, flowing through pathways that trail far beyond her perception. The Dreaming becomes a forest to her, then. A forest with broken ground, and she can see beneath her feet all the places where the roots of a single, great tree twine and twist through the earth. Shining in all the places where the oldest spirits have touched it. Leaves rustle like feathers around her, and shadows break up the gleam of a distant sun.

She wakes up with heart pounding in her chest.

Years move strangely. Sometimes they slow, and every minute feels like an hour, and every day feels like a century. And sometimes it’s more like she blinks, and finds that dozens of years have passed, and neither she nor the world have changed very much for it. She ventures down into the Deep Roads, and meets dwarves, and stands in audience with a Titan, and feels the strange, borrowed guest of a spirit in her resonate with its beating heart.

She meets an ancient, nameless nature spirit that puts her in mind of that Dreaming tree again. A Spirit of Contemplation that sits deep within the Dreaming, running like a circular waterfall, calm and steady and slow. She brushes a hand through the waters of it, and loses ten years to all the notions and questions and uncertain ideas that twist inside of her; until Fear and Deceit carry her back from it.

She witnesses the birth of a Spirit of Curiosity, so vibrant and energetic and intent. It follows her around for a few years, before drifting off to ensconce itself in a library elsewhere; eager to find young minds to tend to, to discover itself in the hearts of other new spirits and Dreaming-born children, and make sense of the world in its own way.

Lavellan does not tell it of her quest. She finds she cannot, in those days; if only because it is too difficult for she herself to put into words what it is that she’s trying to achieve.

She sits in council meetings, and serves as a guest to various evanuris. She sits in Elgar’nan’s halls as he laments the fleeting nature of childhood, and wanders Mythal’s gardens as she watches the world like a player at a chessboard. She slips through the shadows of Sylaise’s flock, and finds an interesting prisoner in June’s inadequate prison, and follows Andruil on bloody and brutal hunts, and stands before the gleaming fangs of Ghilan’nain’s creations. There are secrets, she finds, hidden in the corded muscles of horned beasts, and in the almost-fearful gleam of Andruil’s golden eyes when she stands before the carcass of her fallen prey, and in the whisper of Sylaise’s fingers where they pass across gleaming carvings. In the long hours June spends scowling at blueprints that yield no magnificence beneath his scrutiny, and the quiet that steals over Mythal when it seems no eyes are upon her. In the way Elgar’nan plucks flowers from the ground, and Falon’Din looks at his brother with the edge of one betrayed.

It is a single, broken family, in a deeply flawed hierarchy, and they are all of them, she thinks, flailing just the way that she has been. None of them are any less lost in the mess of time and purpose and longing and dreaming. This twisting world, with its blood-soaked pillars, and its endless, unanswered questions.

She’s eight hundred years old when Falon’Din nearly kills her.

She’s pretty sure he’s _tried_ to kill her a few times before, although never in any way that could be substantially proven. And she’s known he _wanted_ to kill her ever since those early days, when she was small and relatively helpless, and her only real protection was Dirthamen. But those times, she thinks, were tempered by his perception of her as somehow temporary. As if he could convince himself that sooner or later, Dirthamen would wake up and decide he was finished with her. That some excursion or adventure would rid him of her. That the other evanuris would begin to find her as offensive as he did.

As she nears up on a thousand years, though, it seems to occurs to him that the _only_ way he is getting rid of her, is if he gets rid of her himself.

She is staying with Elgar’nan, of all people, when it happens. Away from Dirthamen. Bidding on behalf of a Nameless war criminals who are dying in miserable conditions in her grandfather’s lands; who have enduring centuries of punishment, at this point, and who her conscience cannot abandon. The unmarked slaves who reside in the territory of all the evanuris suffer reprehensibly. But Dirthamen has no recourse to free them unless the others agree to, and so she has dedicated herself to this task.

It’s a goal she might achieve, at least.

As she and her grandfather are dining and debating matters of vengeance, justice, forgiveness, and overkill, something _pulls_ at her from the Dreaming. It’s an odd sensation, rather like missing a step and feeling a hand close around her ankle at the same time. It’s also the only warning she gets, giving her just a brief moment of bafflement before the Dreaming cracks at her back, and something _rips_ her straight through it.

The demon which sets upon her is ancient and fierce and insensible, incapable of speech, resonating with hatred and choking resentment. It is swift, too, carrying her through walls and floors and ceilings, slamming her against surfaces, trying to break her apart as she forces herself to go through them, instead. The Dreaming and Waking world both waver around them. Flames burn, licking at their heels.

She wishes she could say Falon’Din underestimated her, and she thinks he did.

But in the end, the real catch is that he underestimated Elgar’nan.

She cuts through the demon and the beasts claws sink into her, burning cold. Malignance. Her flesh rots at its touch, and her heart feels like it’s trying to beat fire through her veins. And then there _is_ fire, everywhere, hot and red and she’s legitimately, mindless terrified for a moment. A demon at her front, and inferno at her back, and blood in her throat.

Then Elgar’nan roars, and white-hot light scours the creature gripping her. The flames around her burn, but not towards her.

She falls into darkness, and wakes to find her grandfather’s healers around her, and Dirthamen’s hand resting on her brow. Fear and Deceit curled around her, like giant, feathered cats more than birds.

It takes her a while to recover.

The evanuris break into a storm of outrage and conflict as she does.

Accusations over her attack are flung left and right. Culprits are suggested and debated over. Nameless forces, acting from their distant base. Insurgents closer to home among Elgar’nan’s own people. Evanuris themselves. Falon’Din points the finger at Andruil, and Ghilan’nain points it back at Falon’Din, and Mythal fails to intercede in her usual ways; until at last she spends and evening speaking to Dirthamen. The contents of that conversation remain a mystery.

But when Dirthamen emerges from it, he points the finger firmly at his brother.

“The Demon of Malignance is one I know. Falon’Din made it; and then remade again into a weapon. It would have obeyed him, and him alone.”

Lavellan is present for the accusation. Ensconced, by his insistence, between Elgar’nan and Dirthamen, as the seating arrangement has been changed. She sees the look on Falon’Din’s face, as Dirthamen speaks. The shock, first and foremost, so sincere and profound that she almost does pity him. He never for a moment thought that Dirthamen would choose _her._ Never thought he would offer such knowledge to the others.

But then the betrayal burns, and Falon’Din tries to kill her again. Hissing and furious, nearly getting himself cut down by the other evanuris before he’s forced to withdraw. The conflict shatters the conference hall, decimating the ridiculous fire pillars and nearly bringing the ceiling down on everyone’s heads. Andruil and Elgar’nan give chase to Falon’Din immediately, until he vanishes from his city holdings through the eluvian network, and breaks the connection behind him.

The conflict which follows is a bloody, miserable mess.

Falon’Din slaughters indiscriminately, hoarding what power he can. He kills many of his followers, and many poor souls who happen to be passing through the crossroads where he flees. Whole villages in his holdings are put to the blade, and demons overflow his fortress. Spirit vaults, storehouses of power, are cracked open, and drank dry.

But there is not much conflict in rallying the remaining evanuris against him. Even Dirthamen doesn’t hesitate.

“I am sorry,” Lavellan tells him.

“You did not do this,” he replies. “I should have expected him to attempt something. I know him best.”

“Even if you had stopped this particular attempt, he would have made others,” she reasons.

“Yes,” Dirthamen agrees.

He pauses, and then rests a hand on top of her head. He’s tall, today. His straight, his hands steady. But Fear is much bigger than deceit. A massive, black-winged shadow that seems to be growing by the minute, before it wings its way into the Dreaming.

“Are you scared?” she asks him.

His hand falls away.

“To die may be an interesting experience,” he says.

“You will not die,” she promises.

“Falon’Din may. Part of me will go with him, if he does. But if he does not, then he may kill you, someday. Part of me would die, then, too. In such fights as these, there is no victory,” Dirthamen reasons. Then he pauses, a moment.

Reaching up to his face, he pulls off his mask.

It comes away easily. The face underneath is very much, she thinks, that of Falon’Din’s twin. Fine-featured and handsome. But Falon’Din’s own countenance never once held such soft sorrow. Falon’Din’s eyes, she would wager, have never brimmed with tears over the plight of an endangered loved one.

“It is my fault,” Dirthamen says, quietly.

She reaches out, and takes one of his hands in her own.

“You are not Falon’Din,” she tells him. “It is not your fault that he does what he does.”

“I gave him his purpose.”

“And he chose to accept it,” she counters. “He chose what to do with it. He decided what greatness looked like for himself, and he made it bloody. You cannot be blamed for that, no more than I can be blamed for provoking him by loving you. A spirit might behave like a storm, sometimes, but it is not one. Nor is a person. Falon’Din is not a mindless force of nature, and he holds the blame for his actions.”

Dirthamen regards her for a moment. A few tears tremble at the corners of his eyes. He lets go of her hand to put the mask back on before they fall, his features wavering a bit as he does.

“Parents must protect their children. Twinned souls must safeguard one another, too. I have failed on both counts. But today I fail Falon’Din deliberately,” he says.

“He failed you first,” Lavellan counters. “And in many more ways.”

Dirthamen considers this for a moment.

“Yes,” he finally decides. His eyes glitter in the dark openings of his mask. “But Falon’Din has never lived by such standards. By his view, he has been only good to me. I am the betrayer, in the end. In the end, I loved him less.”

 _Well it isn’t as though he was terribly lovable,_ Lavellan thinks. But it seems like it might not be the thing to say right now. So she swallows back the sentiment, and hugs her parent instead. However strange the twists of fate that brought them to this point might be, that’s what he is to her, in the end.

He rests his head atop hers.

“We might not have to kill him,” she offers.

“I do not know if that prospect is better than any other,” Dirthamen admits.

He’s loved Falon’Din for all the long years of his life, she knows. Loved him despite all the crimes he’s committed. Loved him despite the way Falon’Din loathes and despises any good thing that comes into his brother’s life. Loved him all the way up to this point, and loves him still.

So that he would say such a thing…

Lavellan closes her eyes, and holds him tighter.

~

Falon’Din doesn’t die, in the end.

The battle is brutal chaos and death at every turn, and many, many people _do_ die. But Falon’Din is spared. It seems a grave injustice to her, in many ways. She thinks he should be a decimated as everything he’s ever cut open and left bleeding in his wake. She thinks, in fact, that many of them should be at this point. As she stands in a blood-soaked chamber, full of the remnants of destroyed things that were each of them greater – even if they were horrible – than the selfish, warped ambitions of the wretch that killed them, she thinks that maybe _this_ is what she’s meant to do.

Cut them all down.

Be the Betrayer. Take the empty seat in their circle, left unfilled by the wolf who was supposed to come here in her place.

Her blade trembles in her hand. The air around her flares with the magic of battle. The evanuris allied against one of their own. But they are exhausted, now; Falon’Din’s rampage, the creature he had made of himself, has spent most of their energies.

 _Now,_ a voice whispers in her conscience. _Do it now. End it now._

Her blade trembles.

Dirthamen and Mythal kneel before Falon’Din’s broken form, and bind him the Dreaming. Elgar’nan watches, flames dying down; gaze hard. Ghilan’nain leans against Andruil, and Sylaise and June stand at the chamber entrance, quietly sealing one another’s wounds.

They have brought down the most monstrous of their own, today.

Her blade trembles in her hand, and she knows she won’t lift it against them.

She sheathes it, instead, and sets upon picking through the awful gore and mess of the hall. And then her steps carry her out into the further chambers, as she hunts for survivors. As she sets about seeing to Falon’Din’s dead.

There is another seat left open now, after all. And she knows death.

Too well.


	8. Mana'Din

It’s only after she takes on her dead uncle’s mantle that she really starts regularly wearing a mask.

It’s easier to deal with his followers that way, she’d found. Not that there’s a great wealth of them left, considering the measures he went to in trying to defeat his family. In a morbid sense he did her something of a favour, by clearing his most zealous and powerful followers over to the other side before she had to figure out what to do with them. There are still some left, of course. Many of the more remote villages couldn’t be culled by him in time, and a fair few of his followers had fled. It seems that he had used his high-ranking zealots to round up as much of the populace in his settlements as he could, and sacrificed them to stoke his power. He had nearly severed himself clear from the Dreaming with the amount of blood magic he’d used, before the end; at last killing his highest ranking servants.

But it hadn’t been enough.

The first matter, of course, is tending to the dead.

Souls move beyond the Dreaming, in death. But there are markers of their passage through the world. Echoes, like the phantom memories of dwarves which are sung by the Titans in the Deep Roads. But not quite the same. They need soothing. Spirits of Transition, of Peace, can help with that. There are few of the latter to be found in Falon’Din’s lands, though. Sylaise gifts her one from the ranks of her own servants. A quiet and, of course,  soothing presence, which follows Lavellan’s steps as she directs the burying of the bodies, and does her best to find catharsis for the ragged, fearful remnants they have left behind. The shards of shattered spirits are gathered, and hurried away into safe and secret dreams, where they can heal and regrow.

Perhaps it’s owed to Peace’s presence, or perhaps it’s merely that some part of her has been mourning for a very long time. But even though this is yet another tragedy which might be laid upon her shoulders, it’s an easier burden to bear this time. Seeing to the dead… helps. It feels almost like the funeral she never got to have, as the masses are mourned and rituals are invoked, and there are so many fallen, no one much notices if she slips some inexplicable tributes in among the burial ceremonies.

Falon’Din had killed them before, she knows.

But still. She wishes she had killed him quietly years ago. Before it came to this. Even as she knows what it would have cost Dirthamen. She could have done it, she thinks. Come to it.

But as it happens, the new Shepherd of the Dead abhors sacrifices.

When those who fell have been helped as much as they may be, she turns, then, to the living. And that is where the mask comes into play. Somehow, bare-faced and gazing eye-to-eye with her new, terrified followers, she’s more frightening to them. It takes her a while to discern why. But Falon’Din had inspired so many strange tales and rumours of his ‘great power’ in amongst his people. Building the awe and reverence for him. Tales of how he could kill with a stare. Of how he could steal a soul by looking into someone’s eyes.

Her new people know she’s his… replacement. Unofficially, at first, as she simply takes over cleaning up the results of his defeat and all the death that came before it. But several months in, Mythal essentially informs her that, once the funerary ceremonies are dealt with, she will be awarded his remaining followers and territories more formally. But even without that, it’s fairly clear what’s going on.

She thinks, maybe, if she spent enough time at it, sooner or later people would realize that she didn’t intend to kill them with her stare. But they’re already so shaken, and frightened. Those who fled fear retribution for disloyalty – and she has to talk Elgar’nan out of delivering it to them. Those who survived are mostly villagers from remote settlements, drenched in horror stories and all but convinced that with Falon’Din gone, they will be burnt upon some pyre in his memory.

She does what she can to disabuse them of those notions. And, before long, she starts wearing the mask. It’s too much, she thinks. Too much to ask them to reorient their worldview so quickly. If a calm, faceless figure is more comforting than an… admittedly somewhat steely-eyed woman, then she can give them that. For now. Halvarel makes her a simple white mask, with green lenses over the eyes, and a neutral expression that seems a good match for Peace’s usual visage. Placid and patient. Better than any attempt at friendly smiles, which just seem mocking in context.

“Wear white,” Sylaise advises her, with enough seriousness to draw her complete attention during the city’s mourning processions. She’s standing between her and Dirthamen, in dark blue and with her face uncovered, since there are none of Falon’Din’s people in attendance at the moment.

“Why white?” she wonders.

“Falon’Din wore white to look like bones,” Sylaise tells her. “But mostly he favoured dark colours, and so he only wore it in hints, as often as not. His followers must believe that there was something worthwhile in him, if they are not to abandon our authority as inherently flawed. Or continue to serve it out of fear alone. If you want them to follow you, you must show them that you are like Falon’Din; and utterly unlike him as well. Wear white. Tell them that you have what was best in him, but in abundance. Even if you are truly nothing like him at all.”

She considers this.

And she doesn’t have any better ideas, really.

So she wears white. White armour, with her white mask. White gold, when she must don finery. No gems. Pale, laughably cheap and simple glass beads, and pearls, and yes, some carved bone rings and necklaces that Andruil gifts to her. Most of Falon’Din’s personal possessions are set aside and locked away, in light of his being ‘only sleeping’. But some treasures are petitioned for and argued over. She lets most of them go quite freely.  The infrastructure which Falon’Din has built his lands around will need to be torn up and replaced anyway. She has no designs on maintaining some sort of grandiosity by way of perpetual sacrifices, nor any plans to imprison spirits or shatter them to such ends. The spirit vaults, the storehouses and traps throughout Falon’Din’s territory, must be found and dismantled. Those that can be salvaged are released. That which can be returned to the Dreaming, is.

The surprising benefit of her predecessor’s narcissism is that most of his actual settlements had already been getting by on meagre power supplies, and with their magic limited to what they themselves could conjure. The farms are something of an issue, though. Falon’Din had at least been willing to acknowledge that his people were not much good to him if they were starving to death. Especially when they might be needed as soldiers. The downside of that, of course, is that his farms operate in much the same fast-and-immoral manner as everything else in his lands. She has to upend his entire agricultural system, and she needs more labourers than she has in order to manage it. She needs more followers on the whole, really, if she is going to hold Falon’Din’s territory and maintain it, and actually get his fields in working order, and his settlements built more soundly, and all his hellish death traps and useless nightmare castles cleared away.

Sylaise and June step forward, at least, with offers of dismantling Falon’Din’s Arlathan holdings, and building something more suitable to her own tastes in its place. She gladly acquiesces, even knowing she will have to turn the place over again to find all the spying magics and runes they will likely layer throughout it. But she does stipulate that no sacrifices are to be made, which limits the construction.

Her aunt and uncle balk at the restriction.

June, of course, argues the most vociferously against it.

“No manor _fitting_ of Arlathan can be built in such a way,” he insists.

“Is it too great a challenge for your intellect?” she wonders. She is wearing the mask that day. Her hands folded carefully in front of her, her tone even and careful, in the way she has taken to speaking whenever she must formally address Falon’Din’s people, and those among them whom she’s appointed as chief managers and representatives, for the time being.

June’s mouth shuts with an audible ‘click’.

“I apologize,” she adds. “I should not have presumed that your offer would extend over the matter of such difficulties. My own people will handle the remodeling, in whatever way they can rise to the challenge.”

“Your _people_ are largely peasants and defectors,” June says, sneering just a bit. “With your restrictions, they would barely manage to build a straw hut.”

“It would be a shame to clear away one eyesore just to replace it with another,” she agrees.

Sylaise raises an eyebrow at her, but mostly seems amused. Her aunt is just pleased enough, truly, that Falon’Din’s… building will be replaced. The structure is outside the actual walls of the main city. Shadowed by them, in most ways, but still quite visible from Sylaise’s glittering, floating palace. The severe walls and death-inspired features have been the bane of her existence for many years.

June argues, further. But in the end she leaves that meeting with an agreement that construction will adhere to her specifications, and a compromise that the holdings need not be large nor elaborate, so long as they are functional and fair enough to stop offending Sylaise.

Matters of the farms and needed labour and restructuring press upon her, though, and council discussions turn to arguments over who should be expected to give over how many people to her service. Her own suggestions on the matter lead to a great deal of tumult, and yet, again, eventual capitulation, as she sits next to Dirthamen, and he offers only quiet agreement. He’s been introspective and remote by turns, lately. Grieving and often silent. Even though Falon’Din isn’t dead, his mind seems to turn recent matters over with a lot of care; and he has more to handle, too, without her present to help manage _his_ territories.

“I want the slave camps,” she says, in a lull between some of June’s protests and Andruil’s sharp remarks.

A brief, stunned silence follows this assertion. As if all of them had somehow forgotten that the people in those camps actually qualified as _people_ , and could, in fact, be put to uses other than toiling away as eternal punishment for centuries-old crimes.

“And here you seemed so insistent upon abandoning concepts of sacrifice,” June says to her.

“You think I will kill them?” she wonders. “No. I have made my position clear enough over the years. It has been long enough. Many in those camps have been in them since before I was born. My lands have need of occupants, and you have people to whom you hold no affection or regard. Give them to me. They are as good as dead to you anyway, simply waiting for the day you choose them for some sacrificial block.”

There is a pause.

“I am surprised Falon’Din himself never tried that line of reasoning,” Mythal says, with a wry smile.

“It is absurd,” Sylaise insists. “You cannot build followers out of slaves. A few, perhaps. Those who show rare promise or remorse, and have redeemable qualities. But most of them are in those camps for a reason. Give them leave to overrun your lands, and they will try to seize your territory out from underneath you.”

“Most of them are in those camps because of a choice they made centuries ago. If it proves disastrous, then it proves disastrous. My lands are already a mess. I can think of no better opportunity to _try_ and make a different life for them. And I cannot believe my own beloved family would rather deny them any chance for all eternity than take a risk.”

That remark provokes another uproar. Elgar’nan chides her insolence and more concerns are raised. Voices rise with them. Andruil, she is surprised to see, takes her side in the matter. “If it fails, my hunters and I will make a great sport of finally bringing those useless bodies into death’s service in another fashion,” the huntress reasons. Ghilan’nain, too, seems to find it a fair prospect. She herself, as the next-youngest evanuris, has few slaves and few followers, and would rather spare the former than the latter.

In the end, though, it is Mythal who makes the difference.

“The slaves of Elvhenan belong to all of us,” Mythal says. “And none of us. But the camps are within our respective territories. And mine, I think, shall be moved to this wealth of fresh land in my granddaughter’s domain. And it seems only fair, in light of her need of fine followers, that she be allowed to name as many of the slaves as she pleases as her subjects. Though I would caution her to exercise careful judgement. Many in those camps are in them because they refused to take on markings at the outset of their capture. And many, I suspect, would rather die than take them still. You cannot recruit them all, Mana’Din.”

Her new title falls from Mythal’s lips like a warning.

“I promise you, Mother of my Father. I will do my very best,” she replies.

With Mythal ceding her camps, then, the others cannot do less without seeming more petty, under the circumstances, than they’re willing to. And in the end, she thinks, they really _would_ rather part with their unmarked labourers than their more loyal subjects. The line between servant and slave is very blurry in Elvhenan, she thinks, when most everyone has to wear the markings of some master or another on their face.

The subject of vallaslin weighs on her.

She takes a moment, after that meeting, to wash her face. She runs her fingers carefully over her blank skin. For years she wore Dirthamen’s vallaslin. There hadn’t been any other way to keep safe. But now it’s gone, and she’s bare-faced again. Her ascension saw the markings removed.

Dirthamen had done it himself.

Old words falling from his lips, his hands casting a familiar light across her features.

Falon’Din’s former followers still wear his blood writing. A matter of convenience. The simple thing to do, she supposes, would be to keep his pattern. She doesn’t have the sway to erase the need for it. Not yet. It’s hard-won enough to wring even reasonable concessions out of some of the others, half the time. She doesn’t really want to be one of them. To be Falon’Din. Leaving his markings as they are could be a way to distance herself from them.

But she’s still going to have to write them onto her new followers. And there are quite a few who – fairly – associate that particular design with every vile act the designer committed himself to.

The more she tries to clean up the mess of his territory, the more vile acts she uncovers, it seems.

She stares at her face.

Looks down at her mask, and trails her fingers across the smooth, unmarked surface of it.

In the end, of course, she compromises. Pares down Falon’Din’s design to the simpler form she recalls from her own long-lost culture, and then pares it down further still, until only the brow piece is left. She considers altering it further. Softening the jagged lines of it, perhaps. But it still is what it is, in the end. Maybe it’s better to leave some allusions to the wrongness of it. At least, until she can remove the need for it altogether. Or change the meaning of it, instead.

She carves the new design into her mask. Even if she can’t put it on her own actual face. If she’s going to put it on others, at least she can wear it herself, too.

The slave camps empty, one by one, into her lands.

It is, of course, a giant mess.

Elgar’nan loans her the use of several of his enforcers and peacekeepers, but most of them are far too heavy-handed and only exacerbate the existing issues. They make her think of Templars, trying to ‘police’ mages in the only way they think ‘such people’ _can_ be controlled – by locking them away, by threatening them with punishment, but watching them and waiting for them to inevitably break under scrutiny and do something to cause offence. Mythal’s enforcers do a little better, but she ultimately sends most of them away, too. Too many associations. These elves are not just being moved to a larger prison – not insofar as she can prevent that.

The former slaves themselves are a… mixed bag, she finds. Not that she blames them. Any of them. The expectation is that any who refuse to accept her ‘generous’ offer and take on her vallaslin and pledge their full loyalty to her either be sent back, as returned gifts to soften the blow of the loss of sacrificial fodder to whichever evanuris’ lands they hailed from, or else – and more likely, it seems, even to the thoughts of those who know her – cut open on her own sacrificial altars.

The only reason there are _still_ altars in her lands is because Falon’Din had so many of them. She has counted. He nearly had as many altars as _bathrooms._

And there _are_ those who refuse to take on her markings. And she understands. Many of them spent all those years suffering and bleeding and toiling out of sheer defiance against the evanuris. The unwillingness to submit. To do it now might seem like all those years were for nothing. And even if the suffering _was_ ultimately just… a terrible thing, done by people who, however much attachment she may have gained to them, are by and large terrible themselves, it matters. It makes a difference.

_Bare-faced and free._

There is a village that lies along a river, that leads into Dirthamen’s lands, and thence out to the sea. It is a quite pleasant place, really. Full all of little fishing boats. Falon’Din had emptied it.  The forest beside it is full of graves, now. Silent markers in among the trees. A hill nearby is actually a sonallium. Elves in uthenera are meant to sleep there. Its occupants had been cleaned out long ago, though. Back when Falon’Din had first claimed the territory. The sleeping elders easy prey. Their hidden bedchamber dating back to the days before Arlathan was built.

She sends the elves who refuse to take on her vallaslin there.

She expects most of them will try to take the boats down the river and to the sea, to join the Nameless colony beyond the empire’s borders. She tells Dirthamen to keep his people from the river. Let them go, she thinks. The war is at a lull, and if there are consequences to it, then they are ones the evanuris – herself included, for her part in their continued rule – deserve to face.

Some do.

Some don’t, though. Enough of the boats go and enough of the unmarked elves stay that she has to commission some new ships, in order to keep  the actual fishing viable to sustain the village population, and send food and some other supplies in the meanwhile. And then she discovers that the merchants and couriers and other marked elves who are interacting with the village are being utterly shit about it, and things come to a head when an unmarked elf kills a merchant, and there is much uproar over that and, admittedly, merchants are a fairly vital component of her territory’s already unstable economy, and Falon’Din had already murdered a fair few of his. Immortal societies. Most of what the merchant knew and the connections that they had to other merchants in the employ of other evanuris dies with them.

The subsequent uproar is another headache, as the freshly-marked former slaves clash with Falon’Din’s existing servants over the matter, and everyone is angry, and everyone is also surprisingly out for blood, it seems, considering how much has already been spilled.

And she knows this will establish a precedent. Many precedents, in fact. Just how many rights do the unmarked have in her lands? What she does will get back to the other evanuris, no doubt. What she does will also determine whether or not her subjects will ever treat the residents of the little fishing village in any remotely decent fashion. Whether or not they will be able to defend themselves. Whether or not more of those boats will disappear down the river, and whether or not Dirthamen, she suspects, will let them keep on going out to the sea.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, she supposes. But she still can’t help but think that if that damn merchant had just kept their hands to themselves, they’d still be alive and she wouldn’t have yet another reason for people to try and assassinate her.

And there have been _a lot_ of assassination attempts.

She has to make a damn speech about it all. Has to do it from the balcony of one of her dearest uncle’s least heinous properties, in her white mask and her white armour, projected like a ghost across the landscape of her largest settlements. She proclaims the unmarked residents of her lands ‘honoured guests’, free to live their lives peaceably, and to defend their persons from unwelcome assaults. But she ties it in with declarations to the effect that no higher-ranking elves under her rule will be permitted to demand the bodies of others be used to serve their whims or satisfy their desires.

Most of her people are still from the lower rungs of society, whether they come from Falon’Din’s villages or from the slave camps. Internally, the announcement is _fairly_ well-received. There are some, of course, who are disappointed that their rise in status won’t come with an easy pass to abuse those beneath them (and she makes particular note of them). And there are some who will try it anyway, of course. But while most of her own people are willing to accept the trade-off of additional rights for themselves in exchange for a minimum of tolerance and courtesy towards those beneath them, the other evanuris aren’t too keen.

Oh, they aren’t bothered so much about the personal rights issues. Mythal has some similar policies, and so does Elgar’nan, and Dirthamen, of course, took them up once she pointed out to him years ago that it was an issue. But the unmarked villagers left to live quietly and without abuses heaped onto them? That bothers them. That has her sitting through another half dozen meetings, trying to redirect the focus off of one single settlement – and really, _most_ of the unmarked elves had taken on her vallaslin, the population isn’t all that big – and heavily implying that any unaccounted for persons had indeed been killed as tribute, until Ghilan’nain pipes in with an accounting from several of her scouts that elves previously confirmed to have been imprisoned in the camps had been spotted among the ranks of the Nameless.

 _That_ gets things rolling with some intensity in a hurry.

The first assumption is incompetence on her part. Of course, they’ve been expecting all along for this ‘servants out of slaves’ business to blow up in her face. And of course it actually _has_ , several times, in a good variety of ways. The newly-marked haven’t integrated seamlessly with Falon’Din’s remaining populace, and there are all those assassination attempts, and several of the people Dirthamen has loaned her the service of have brought her reports of budding rebellions and anti-evanuris sentiments. She’s pretty sure at least half of the newly-marked elves she’s promoted to oversee their fellows are planning to betray her at some point, and also wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be a conservative estimate.

But even so, the actual yearly death toll in Falon’Din’s lands has decreased _dramatically._

Not that the other evanuris are terribly appreciative of that, considering her population base.

Ultimately, Elgar’nan seems the most offended over it, and matters come to a head as he demands to be permitted to march an army of peacekeepers into her lands to ‘assert order’ and the calmness she’s managed to maintain since this insanity began snaps like an overburdened branch.

“Are you so eager to bathe my soil in blood again?” she snaps, standing up and slamming her hands down at the table. “Death is _my_ dominion, granted to me by everyone sitting at this table. In my lands, I will decide who delivers it, and to whom it is delivered. I am the one who must perform the burial rites, now. I am the one who must find the fragments of souls and spirits and see that they keep from splintering further into corrupted spirits and fractured dreams. The mess of death is mine to handle. I offer you the courtesy of not presuming to handle it in _your_ lands, Grandfather. Do not presume, then, that you know how to bring order or justice to mine.”

Elgar’nan strikes her.

It is a single, solid blow, quick enough that she fails to anticipate it. Strong enough to nearly knock the mask off of her face. Her attendants are new to their roles and slow to react, and today she’s very happy about that, because it means they move back in alarm rather than doing anything rash. Dirthamen’s are not so freshly trained, however, and they draw weapons, as Dirthamen himself stands.

Elgar’nan’s attendants draw, too, but he raises a hand and they don’t move from their positions.

“You forget your place, Daughter of Dirthamen,” he says. “You are a Leader of the People, but you are yet inexperienced, and hold no authority over me. Do not ever presume otherwise.”

She stretches her jaw a bit underneath her mask, wincing, and straightens up.

She could fight him, she thinks. She could even challenge him to it one-on-one. But then what? If she loses, he’ll likely send his peacekeepers. And she’ll either have to sit back and let them abuse her people, or start yet another ill-fated conflict. Part of her still remembers Elgar’nan as that strange, fervent figure who tried to give her candies when she was small.

And if she wins, she’ll probably be established as one of the strongest fighters among the evanuris. She’s not sure if that’s a card she wants to reveal yet. She’s not even entirely sure that she _is,_ although she suspects that’s the case. Solas’ last gift still burns inside of her, after all. And time has only made her more acclimatized to the various powers and talents an elf of means can unlock in this world.

Not to mention, he’d likely never forgive her.

Still.

If it will at least give the others _pause_ before they think to make the situation she’s wrangling even worse…

Before she can make up her mind, though, Mythal speaks.

“I have no wish to see any other members of this family go the way of Falon’Din,” she says, standing up herself. Her gaze holds Lavellan’s for a moment, before she turns to Elgar’nan. “My husband. It is a rite of passage, as you well know, for all daughters of our line to test their limits when first given the authority to do so. I know you fear for Mana’Din’s safety. So do I. But leaders cannot be coddled. They must rule. And some mistakes must be made in order to be learned from.”

Elgar’nan gives her a long look. But the air around him shifts, just slightly, and she knows Mythal has worked her magic on him again.

The subject remains a source of contention, but contention seems to be the entirety of her life these days. She has to send Peace back to Sylaise in order to keep from corrupting it. Which is a shame, because she misses the steady presence and soothing influence of the spirit.

Two hundred years she spends, trying to get her lands into something resembling working order. Ghilan’nain steals acres of forest from the lands near her border, and she sends Dirthamen’s people back home to tend their own territory, and the night after that some of her rebels assault the wards of the palace she’s staying in, and manage, through some really creative treachery, to all but cave the building in on itself. It doesn’t kill her, but five elves die in the assault. The rebel leader is caught, and she performs her first public execution in this life to add to that toll.

It’s quick, at least.

But there are plenty who aren’t eager to see her done away with, either. One of the oddest forms of placation she finds herself offering is the chance at parenthood. Even with the new occupants in her lands, there are villages and settlements that are still little more than ghost towns. Some of the elves from the camps wish for the chance to enter uthenera, and she offers that freely, and so their number is diminished a bit more, too. The population remains small, so she finds the census takers that June and Mythal loan her come back with reports that essentially amount to ‘make babies and embody spirits and get to it in a hurry’.

And in these times, parenthood is usually a rare opportunity. Many of the newly-marked elves never thought to have it in their lives. Many of Falon’Din’s remaining servants, likewise, had imagined working and working up to build the necessary petitions to get even a chance at it; knowing full well that there were terrible odds that this chance would only end in their child being lost to some sacrificial altar once they were grown.

But at it happens, an elf with a brand new family is less keen on the idea of waging bloody warfare than not. And when she must meet with her fellow leaders individually, she finds herself inviting them to her own lands, and conveniently allowing some attendant or servant with an infant or small child to be present at the outset.

As she recalls from her own childhood, it has a… calming effect on the proceedings.

It earns her a lot of goodwill, this business of families, and gradually, as the first born children of her new generation grow, and the land is restructured, and the last of the altars dismantled, and the Arlathan estate rebuilt, the rebellions and assassination attempts peter off into discontented murmurings and general unhappiness. Which abates further when she appoints one of the most vocally anti-evanuris followers – a very sharp-eyed and wry woman named Elalas – to the role of personal advisor.

“Are you not afraid I might slip a blade between your ribs every time we are alone in a room together?” Elalas asks her, in their first meeting after her promotion.

“Go for the jugular. I am wearing armour, the knife would just skitter over it,” she replies.

“You do not fear death? Let me guess, it is because death is your ‘purview’?” Elalas supposes. She wears her vallaslin like a brand on her forehead; stamped in place in thick, black lines. Lavellan remembers when she took it. How she’d laughed and then cried, and been so angry, and so relieved to no longer have to endure her previous treatment.

She’d offered to take it off again, once. To let Elalas go and join the unmarked faces in the little fishing village. She’d meant it sincerely, but maybe it came across as mocking; the other woman had spat at her feet, and declined with polite words through gritted teeth.

“There are many ways to lose one’s fear of death,” she says, simply. “But I would rather keep my people alive, if it is all the same to you. Killing me signs your death warrant as well, and I think you want to live. Otherwise you would not be here.”

“I am not afraid to die, either,” Elalas tells her, but there is a betraying note to the air around her.

She doesn’t call attention to it, though. Instead she merely shrugs, and settles into the matter of trying to use the woman’s unambiguous displeasure with her life as a sounding board for improving things for people like her.

A few years of that, and Elalas eventually stops looking like she wants to kill her every time they are in a room together. A few decades, and the woman can comfortably dine with her at formal banquets, and no longer stares contemplatively at her throat or her knife when called to stand behind her, among her other advisors and attendants.

(Of course, it’s the ones who are not _nearly_ so obvious who always end up trying to stab her or poison her or light her on fire, come to it.)

A hundred years into her renovations of her territory, she finds her advisor getting piss drunk in her vault, staring at some of the accumulated belongings of Falon’Din’s that had no immediate use or obvious value, and so were essentially put in the ‘to be dealt with later’ pile. Odd treasures and trophies and things which were not obviously torture devices, but were ambiguous enough in their possible utilities to make her uncomfortable with them.

“I never had a clan, you know,” Elalas says. “Nanae and Mama were free souls. Outcasts, I suppose. But happy. Happy outcasts.”

The advisor stares at the accumulated things, and takes a drink from the strong-smelling bottle in her hands.

“We never had any part of any conflict. We just wanted to be left to ourselves. To look after ourselves, to keep our own peace. But any elf who does not pledge themselves to a leader, is an enemy to the great dream of a united society. What does it matter if they are just foragers and nomads who never lifted a blade to anything that was not a fish or pheasant? Either you take the markings, or you are not a person. You are not real. They lock you away, and if you ever try to leave, your face betrays you. Lets every beast and wretch and violent soul in this rotten empire know that you are free game.”

Elalas curses, and spits, and takes another drink. And then she lifts a hand and scrapes her nails down the vallaslin on her face. Her expression falters, a bit. A laugh that’s not really a laugh jolts out of her.

Lavellan only watches as she waver.

“They died, you know. They died with their faces unmarked. My parents. And so many others. They were so strong, that they never gave in.”

Elalas face crumples, then, and she drops to her knees. The bottom of the bottle _tinks_ lightly where it hits the floor, as one of Lavellan’s best advisors sobs, and misery and self-loathing and despair all curl and twist around her.

“So many years. So many years, and I broke. I let them mark me.”

She hesitates, for a moment. But then she moves further into the vault. She drops to her knees next to Elalas, and waits, trying to offer a shoulder but not pressing one where it wouldn’t be welcome. She’s hardly the best choice for comfort, after all. As little as she likes to think of it, she’s one of _them._ But there’s no one else, as of the moment, either.

She’s not wholly surprised when Elalas hits her with the bottle, though.

It’s only hard enough to bruise, slippery with sloshed-over drink as it strikes her shoulder and then hits the ground. It doesn’t break, but it does topple onto its side. Empty enough that hardly anything spills out.

Elalas curses, and reaches over for her and starts tugging at the ties to her mask.

“Take that fucking thing off!” she demands. “Walking around like some sort of statue. Take it off! You are no god, no matter what names they take none of them are gods, _none!”_

She reaches up, and gently bats away the uncoordinated pawing, and unties her mask. She’s worn it so often these days that sometimes she forgets she even has it on. Taking after Dirthamen, she supposes. It’s not that bad of a thing, though she hadn’t even realized that Elalas has never seen her face until that moment.

The cool air actually feels rather welcome on her cheeks.

Which, perhaps, are a little damp.

Elalas gapes at her for a solid minute, wavering drunkenly, eyes red with tears and wide with shock.

Then she grasps the hand that Lavellan still has around her mask, and hastily urges it upwards.

“I changed my mind, put it back on again!” her advisor demands.

She can’t help it. She laughs, mostly out of surprise at such an obvious change in pace.

Elalas swears.

“I did not realize I was that ugly,” she says, but gently, not truly offended as she slips the mask back into place, and ties it on again.

“Ah. No,” the other woman replies, slowly. Still wavering with the obvious effects of a night spent liberating beverages from the dining hall. Elalas makes an odd gesture, and follows it up with some more cursing, and then just sort of leans backwards and stares hopelessly up at the ceiling. “I already shamed my family enough by cracking like a rotten eggshell. I do not need… with… why are you…?”

She waits.

Elalas just sort of flails.

Drunken coherence at its finest.

Still. She hadn’t realized that she seemed quite _so_ detached from the regular populace, that the sight of her own relatively normal face could provoke… really any kind of reaction, apart from misguided fear. She gives her advisor another minute, until the other woman seems like she might be on the verge of passing out. And then she picks her up and carries her out of the vault, and whatever she’d been hoping to find in there, and takes her up to the part of the palace where the higher-ranking chambers are.

She finds Elalas’ room, and lowers her carefully onto one of the sturdy little couches. Leaves her to sleep off her nightly activities with a basin of fresh water handy for the morning.

The next day Elalas is quieter, and understandably more distant. But it doesn’t last too long before she’s back to loudly arguing over various policies and disdaining the systems in place and generally going about business as usual. If with slightly more contemplative glances directed towards the surface of Lavellan’s mask.

Two hundred and ten odd years into things, the ten thousand year anniversary of Arlathan’s founding coincides with another upsurge in rebellion among her followers.

She cannot _possibly_ imagine why.

But there is no chance of her missing the city’s celebrations without losing a lot of what traction she’s managed to gain with her bizarre extended family, and no easy way to attend without, in all likelihood, making the unrest worse. Most of her just wishes she could go wander off for a few decades to clear her head, but that’s not a luxury she can afford. Sometimes she wonders how the other evanuris manage it.

Then she remembers that all of them kill their disloyal followers. Even Dirthamen and Mythal.

So.

Right.

She leaves Elalas in charge of handling a good deal of the situation, while she plans on spending as little time in Arlathan as she can safely get away with.

“What makes you think I will not foment rebellion and have an angry mob waiting for you when you get back?” Elalas wonders.

“Because you comprehend the notion of lesser evils,” Lavellan replies. “And you do not actually think that the rebels could successfully seize and hold my territory long enough for sufficient back-up from the Nameless to arrive.”

“True, on both fronts,” Elalas concedes. “I would rather go with you to Arlathan, and plant a half a dozen bombs underneath the city.”

That would actually be most easily done by infiltrating Dirthamen’s Arlathan holdings via one of the eluvians connected to his network and filling the building with explosives, considering its close proximity to the city’s central wellspring. But she decides not to mention that. Blowing up a city isn’t on the agenda today. Nor, hopefully, for the foreseeable future.

“And that is why I am not taking you in my entourage,” she replies, instead.

“I was not aware I would even be considered for that,” Elalas admits, raising an eyebrow.

“If it would not get you killed, I would gladly let you lay into my relatives,” she admits.

“They deserve it. And more than you do, probably,” her advisor allows.

“Careful. You might begin to sound as if you do not utterly despise me, if you keep going like that.”

“Shut up, you tyrant. You are still one of them. Do not think I have forgotten it,” Elalas snaps by way of acknowledgement. Ever gracious. Lavellan leaves it be, though. She’s not wrong, in the end. Her mind turns to the memory of that hall. Of holding her blade, and weighing the lives of every evanuris in the room. Rebellion and death.

She can never escape them. Or her mishandling of both issues, it seems.

She does clasp her advisor by the shoulder, though, before she leaves. Clad all in white, with her mask on and her hood up. Bone chimes hanging from the hood.

“Take care,” she requests.

Elalas blinks, and then scowls. She folds her arms. But then nods in acknowledgement.

Arlathan makes a stark change of pace from her own lands. Somehow she seems to forget, every time she is away from the city, just how _overwhelming_ it can be. How big and glittering and full of noise and activity and magic it is. Even the more placid parts. Of course, the anniversary celebration isn’t placid by any stretch of the imagination. Her entourage is small; a few bodies smaller than Ghilan’nain’s, but that might almost strike people as respectful, all things considered. They join up with Dirthamen’s people, and it is a procession of black and white all the way up to the meeting hall, where the ceremonies are exchanged.

In Mythal’s entourage, there is a new, white wolf.

She sees him, and somehow, she just… _knows._

When the meeting adjourns, she’s left in private with Dirthamen.

She hugs him tight.

“I miss being able to see you whenever I like,” she tells him, all at once shaken and unsteady.

“I miss that also,” Dirthamen agrees. His hands settle carefully around her. “Something has disturbed you.”

She closes her eyes.

How can it be so long, she wonders – how can it be a little over a thousand years – and still… and yet…

Solas.

Oh, she had waited and wondered. She had almost thought she would be waiting and wondering forever. For millennia. How long would this clock run down for? How much time is there left, now that he has appeared? Has she done anything right? Or nothing?

And what is he like, this young wolf whose spirit is like a beacon to her?

Longing so fierce that there is no chance her father does not pick up on her surges through her, and she finds herself weeping against him, in a way she hasn’t since she was a ‘child’. Since a world’s worth of grief was still fresh and new.

“It is alright,” Dirthamen tells her. “It is alright. Just feel it. Do not try to fix it.”

She sobs against his shoulder. A brittle dam that has burst open. Cries until she has to take off her mask, because the interior is a mess of tears and snot, and Dirthamen sits with her as she leans into him and just keeps on going. For all the night, it seems. Until exhaustion snakes in past all the conflict of her feelings, and falls asleep caught between the warm backing of the couch and the soft material on her father’s shoulders.

She wakes, tucked into bed, with a familiar raven watching her from one of the bedposts.

“Deceit,” she greets.

The raven’s feathers rustle, and it looks at her almost disdainfully. But Deceit’s body language is… unreliable, at best. Particularly when it is calm, and not actively invested in some pointed deception.

The raven doesn’t linger for long after she’s woken, though. Merely takes a moment, and then flits off into the Fade. She feels heavy. As if she slept without dreaming; which, if Dirthamen was feeling protective, is probably the case. She can’t remember anything between falling asleep and waking up, either, which is also fairly telling.

She’s a bit worried, in fact, as she gets up and gets ready for the day’s festivities. Tracks down her entourage and goes over what parts of the ceremonies they’ll be participating in. Dirthamen’s not normally one to do something rash or dangerous – at least, not by his standards – but he can be a bit… funny where she’s concerned. Especially when he decides that something is a parental obligation. She reviews their conversation from the night before, and is happy to realize that she didn’t actually _tell_ him anything.

Not least because the place is probably full of listening devices and spies.

But even so. That doesn’t mean Dirthamen hasn’t figured anything _out._

He has a habit of doing that. And sometimes only partially.

Fortunately, though, the celebrations provide ample distractions. There’s a lot to do and a lot to juggle. There’s little time for her to mingle with the entourages of other evanuris. She must handle ceremonies of remembrance and the portions of the celebrations acknowledging those sacrificed and killed in the founding and sustaining of Elvhenan, and she must try and do it without verbally condemning it all with every other breath. Which is somehow much harder to manage when she keeps spying that white wolf weaving in among Mythal’s people; and sometimes a man, dressed in greens and pale silver, with crystals in his hair and a voice that makes something in her _clench_ every time she hears it.

 _You destroyed the world,_ she thinks. _And I love you. And you destroyed it._

She looks out over the assembled ranks of her fellow evanuris, and knows that she isn’t even just addressing _him_ anymore.

But they get through their proceedings, and then, of course, she has to make haste back to her own territories as soon as decorum will allow. It is a wrench to leave, though. It feels unsettled and strange and wrong to walk out of the city without even speaking to him; and yet it also feels like some kind of inexplicable relief, too.

What would she even say to him?

It’s been so long.

He’s not really even the same person she remembers.

But it doesn’t matter. Solas is out there. Presumably he’s been out there for a while, now. Doing things. Living. Thinking. What does he think of things? He… knows of her. Her reputation. What does he make of it, she wonders? And then she almost chides herself for wondering. Whatever he thinks of it, he can’t be _too_ old. She’s been looking, after all.

Is he happy, she wonders? He must be. He must have been happy at _some_ point in his life, to have been… to…

Well.

She is thoroughly distracted, it seems. She returns to her own lands and their humbler accommodations, and their rebellions, and graveyards. Sleeping hills slowly filling with _actual_ dreamers in uthenera again, and massive pits where vaults of trapped and shattered spirits had been kept. She goes back, and it’s all twisted up. It’s all strange and wrong and she is an _evanuris,_ she is _one of them,_ but she doesn’t want to be like them. She doesn’t want _them_ to be like themselves. Not… not the bad parts, at least. She wants to tear them all from their thrones. And then smash apart the thrones themselves.

But she is very tired, too, of sitting in judgement.

The rebellion dies down. She catches another assassin in her chambers and just shoo’s him out through the balcony.

“I am not in the mood for this,” she tells him.

“I am an assassin, not a prostitute,” he says. “No one is _ever_ in the mood to be assassinated.”

“You must be young,” she replies, and breaks the hilt off of his knife, and snuffs out his spell before it can so much as ruffle the curtains on her bed. He goes without many more objections, then, scaling back down the way he’d come in by. She doesn’t even bother to make a mental note of his face.

Probably, he won’t be coming back.

Elalas, to her surprise, hurries into her chambers not long after her would-be murderer has scampered off with his tail between his legs.

“Do not kill him!” she asks, bursting in through the doors.

Lavellan, who is lying on top of her bedspread and feeling sorry for herself at that point, just turns her head.

“Alright then,” she says.

Elalas comes up short, clearly a bit befuddled.

“I… um. Sorry. I thought someone might… be here.” She takes a moment to peer around the changing screen and into the ajar door of the bathing chambers. Lavellan’s properties are not opulent. They can’t afford to be, and she’s disinclined to it anyway. But they’re still fairly nice, and in their niceness, offer a few hiding places for a would-be killer.

It’s always such a juggling act. Public baths only, or private baths that killers might try and hide in?

“You just missed him. I sent him back down the balcony,” she says. “Why? Is he the son of someone important? Some twenty-six-year old rebel full of big dreams and terrible ideas?”

“The last one,” Elalas concedes.

“Free pass, then,” she decides. “If he tries it again I reserve the right to have angry words with his parents.”

There is an awkward pause.

“I see. Alright, then. Yes. Very good,” Elalas decides, at length. Staring at her, and then away again, and then at her again. Her advisor turns to leave, and then seems to decide the better of it and turns back again. Indecision is so thick in their air she actually takes a moment to see if a spirit has turned up. It wouldn’t be entirely implausible.

“What?” she wonders.

“Just… what are you _doing?”_ Elalas blurts.

She blinks behind her mask.

“What do you mean, what am I doing?” she replies. “It is a bed. I am lying on it.”

“Is this how you people sleep?” her advisor asks. “In full regalia, lounging around like some strange seductive puppet? Do you sleep in the mask? Do you actually _sleep_ , or do you just… lie there, absorbing some sort of essence from the Dreaming?”

“…Did you just call me a _seductive puppet?”_ she asks.

“No,” Elalas says, and finally seems to decide that retreat is the way to go. She turns on her heel and marches straight out of the room. Not even bothering to close the door.

Lavellan sighs and does it herself with a wave of her hand.

And then she actually does stand up, and change into something more comfortable. She takes off her mask and double-checks to see if there are any more assassins for the evening, and then properly resets all the wards that went down while she was away – because no sacrifices means no perpetual and self-sustaining protections – and goes to bed.

And dreams.

And in dreams, she doesn’t wear her mask, or her white costume. No bone jewellery or glass beads or white gold rings. She walks comfortably, through pathways that Dirthamen showed her. Through places that yield to her easily, and welcome her readily. And she thinks of Solas, and how he had always been so much more at home in dreams. Of how exhausting the weight of the world can be. Of what it’s like to try and help people, and have them hate you for it, and know, deep down, that they’re not even wrong to.

She’s not surprised, when she comes upon the wolf.

He’s pestering Knowledge, when she finds him. That familiar voice moving in excited cadence, fit to match any Spirit of Curiosity’s.

His tail is even wagging.

Well. Occasionally flopping, more like. But the sentiment is there, it seems, for all that the young wolf is striving to maintain his composure. He is asking after the history of Arlathan. Likely inspired by the recent celebrations. There are enough topics to learn about in the world, and enough things to cover, that she wouldn’t be surprised if he knows very little of it; and she also wouldn’t be surprised if he knows most of it, and is just trying to lead Knowledge into revealing anything truly new unawares.

As she watches their conversation, her suspicions begin to lean towards the latter. And the clenching in her chest, at the rhythm of his voice, begins to give way to a sort of deep ache. The kind she has carried in her for centuries. Like pressing at a bruise that’s never entirely healed. Sore muscles that have stretched and stretched but never snapped.

Knowledge falls quiet. The great, dark spirit looks towards her; like an aged sylvan creaking as it cranes downwards in movement. Deep pools surround it in the Dreaming. Clear and sparkling, and dark and shadowy. Knowledge moves with the weight of all the knowing it has accumulated over the years. It’s a spirit born from Dirthamen, and it keeps to itself, mostly. But of course, she’s spent many an evening in its company.

“Hello, Lavellan,” it acknowledges.

The wolf halts his questions, and turns towards her.

She hesitates, a moment, before walking forwards. Between the rippling edges of two of the pools.

“Hello, Spirit,” she replies.

“You are seeking something,” it notes.

“I always am,” she says, waving a hand dismissively. She looks at the wolf. So pristine, with an openness to his eyes.

Pride.

He tilts his head curiously at her.

“Greetings,” he says. “You must hail from Mana’Din’s lands.”

She blinks, and the realizes that he has no idea what she looks like without her mask on; and that of course, anyone willing to walk bare-faced through the Dreaming would either have to be an evanuris, or perhaps one of the residents of her little fishing village.

“A good guess,” she remarks.

His tail flips.

“Do you know Knowledge well? I would not have expected… I mean. I am surprised to see someone like you here,” he says, clearly trying to correct his course and smashing into the same rather telling set of presumptions anyway.

She raises an eyebrow at him.

“Like me?” she asks.

“I would not have supposed that those who refuse the notion of progress would seek out Knowledge,” Pride says, digging himself all the deeper.

Those who refuse the notion of progress?

She supposes that’s an understandable mistake to make, given the way progress is spoken of in Elvhenan. And the way Mythal speaks of it, too. Cooperation and unity and service and sacrifice, duty and surrender, in the name of building something greater. But what greatness is there in monuments to the vanity and egotism of rulers who hunger in a way that can never be satisfied?

“Elvhenan is not synonymous with progress, Little Wolf,” she says. “Especially when you consider the matter of what ‘progress’ is progressing _towards_ as being of some importance.”

“Most seek knowledge,” the spirit opines. “In some shape or form. Some seek to apply it. Some horde it to themselves. Some require it, to unlock the doors to further paths in life. Any question, no matter how small or simple, is a request for it. It is hasty to presume that anyone with a different perspective must hold it only in willful ignorance.”

Pride turns and regards Knowledge with some apparent irritation.

“That is the longest single thing you have said since I arrived,” the wolf notes.

“Knowledge likes to speak of itself,” she asserts, moving around another pool, and settling at the base of a gnarled white tree. The branches bend and sway over her head like hypnotized serpents.

“Or it likes to speak with you. Perhaps you could convince it to tell me more of Arlathan?” Pride suggests.

She raises an eyebrow.

“What makes you think I am more easily swayed than a spirit?” she wonders.

“Optimism?”

It makes her lips twitch.

“Ask, then,” she decides.

And she helps him, in the end. Because of course she does. Some of his queries she answers herself. Others she assists in drawing out of Knowledge. She spends the evening in quiet conversation, caught for a time between the gentle drifts of reality and thought, present and past, and the questionable nature of the barriers between them.

She wonders if his fur is as soft as it looks.

She knows his teeth are sharp enough.

She wakes while he is still in conversation with Knowledge, distracted by lore of bones and cities and sacrifice. Always so much sacrifice. When she comes back to reality, she finds another assassin has made their way past her wards. This one somewhat more serious than the last. It’s the tremor of their footfalls that draws her out of her dreams, and she banishes the corrupted spirit they have summoned, and casts her assailant rather more _dramatically_ off of her balcony, this time.

Sacrifice, she thinks, is sleeping lightly, in the hopes that she might sleep more soundly.

With the anniversary celebrations behind her, she tries to focus on subduing this latest stream of discontent. The population is beginning to even out, but it’s a younger generation of elves who are coming into their own. She has no desire to crush or quell them, but the other evanuris have spies, she knows, among servants they have loaned her or even given over to her, and informants they’ve bribed. Too much talk of revolution and her family starts to look at her askance. And that would be fine, except that she’s nowhere near ready to defend her lands against any combined force, or even pointed measure from the likes of Elgar’nan or Mythal, disguising invasion as an effort to ‘maintain order’. The distribution of mandatory peacekeepers in her lands is already far higher than in any other evanuris’ territory. Every riot or overly vocal dissident carries with it the threat of some terrible reaction from them. And more than a few times, it’s happened, and she’s had to storm in and try to clean up the mess. Pulling her people out from under the boots of enraged peacekeepers.

Sometimes literally.

It generally improves her _own_ popularity when that sort of thing happens, but then dissent towards the evanuris as a whole increases, and obviously, the rest of them are not too pleased with that just the same.

She debates and argues with her advisors about what can be done, and deals with another incident at the Unmarked Village, and ironically has to handle the issue of discontentment over the amount of labour work required in her territories farms, when the only feasible alternatives for the current levels of work are ones that rely upon systems of sacrifice. Either blood or spirit. But most of the farmers are not quite aware of that, and besides which, even if their workload is twice what it used to be under Falon’Din, it’s still far less than that of a peasant in the post-Veil future.

Not that she doesn’t want to improve it, still. But attaining understanding is a trial.

In this regard, at least, the newly-marked subjects are much easier to manage. A few hours of labour a day is far preferable to labouring _every_ hour of the day. Calls have been rising for more tutors and instructors, as the former slaves adjust to the concept that they can resume old trades, and learn new things, and make reasonable requests – or even unreasonable requests – without having anything stripped away from them. It’s still rocky, and many still hate her and hate the remaining restrictions on themselves, but it’s much better than having bloody fights and assaults and panic every day.

Not that she can always meet the demand. Dirthamen can only spare so many people at any given time, and the other evanuris guard their various experts rather jealously. Some spirits rise up, trying to fill the void. Exchanging knowledge for favours, tentatively moving into lands that they’d staunchly avoided during Falon’Din’s reign.

Establishing the rights of spirits in her territory is laborious, too, as most spirits only have particular rights if they have particular favour. Most of the newly-marked elves comprehend these matters more easily than the people who have transitioned over from Falon’Din’s rule, as during his time, sacrificing spirits was often considered a preferable alternative to sacrificing elves.

The notion that ‘no sacrifices’ doesn’t just mean ‘we’re really low on reserves’ but actually means ‘none, nope, all the altars are gone, we’re not doing it’ is taking… some time to sink in.

“Why?” Elalas asks her, one evening, after the latest round of shouting matches between her motley assemblage of advisors has concluded.

“Why what?” she wonders.

“Why none?” Elalas clarifies. “No sacrifices at all. Why?”

“There have been some,” she points out. Corrupted spirits, maddened and dangerous beyond reason. Public executions, for those who broke too many laws and spilled too much blood themselves. She’s a warrior. Her hands are far from clean. But if she’s going to _have_ to kill, then the pragmatic Dalish hunter in her won’t let her disdain the energy from that.

So far, nearly all of it’s been poured into agriculture and trying to create an infrastructure that can replace the one she tore out.

“Paltry few, who would have died anyway. You would win over a lot more people if you had them living in the same conditions as the elves in other territories,” Elalas points out. “Even I can be bought by a certain degree of comfort, it seems.”

“Freedom from horrific living conditions is a little more pressing than _comfort,”_ Lavellan replies.

“Even so,” her advisor insists.

She is quiet for a moment, leaning back in her seat at the head of the table.

“What do you want me to say?” she wonders.

“The truth?” Elalas suggests, folding her arms. “I have heard a lot of talk about demoralization, about trust, about the supposed principles of Elvhenan. But all the others get their lands to work without refraining from butchering their livestock.”

“They did not build their lands out of traumatized villagers and slaves,” she replies.

“Yes they did,” her advisor counters, flatly. “Granted, they were the ones doing the traumatizing and enslaving, but if anything, one would expect you to be more fervent about it in that case. Try and make up the difference.”

She sighs.

And then she reaches up, and takes off her mask.

Elalas blinks at her, and takes a step back, as she carefully lowers it onto the table in front of her.

“What are you doing?” her advisor demands.

“I hate death, Elalas,” she says.

The other woman freezes.

“…What?”

“I hate it,” she reiterates, running a hand over her bared face. It shouldn’t be, she knows. But sometimes it’s so hard to breathe in that thing. “I have seen so much of it. So many things are lost forever to it. Someone dies, and that is the end of what they can give to the world. It is up to everyone else to carry on in their stead. To make whatever they can of what is left behind. It cannot compare to a living, breathing reality. I did not take on this role by the whim of some fascination with death and its consequences.”

Elalas stares and stares at her, for a long, quiet moment.

In the quiet between them, she pulls her mask back on.

“I am doing this _for_ people. If I sacrifice them, then what is the point?” she wonders.

Elalas stares at her a moment longer.

“Fuck,” she says, and then turns on her heel and storms out of the room.

Lavellan sighs and tosses her arms into the air.

She can’t win with that woman. Probably for the best. Whenever she’s worried that some of her advisors are being too agreeable, at least there are a few she can rely upon to always disagree with something, for some reason.

She calls it an early night.

If she has been sleeping a little more often of late, well. Her nights have also been interrupted by more disasters and frantic summons and ambitious assailants. She thinks she’s had to dodge more assassins since she replaced Falon’Din than she ever did when he was actively trying to have her killed. But at least no one seems to find it remarkable.

She returns to Knowledge’s lair. The spirit is alone, but sure enough, she doesn’t have to wait long before a certain white wolf is loping towards them.

After a moment, she settles beneath her usual tree.

“Lavellan,” Pride greets. “Knowledge.”

The spirit is quiet this evening, it seems. Turning over its own contemplations, rather than requesting additions to its supply of information, or offering up tidbits and commentary. The wolf doesn’t take long to realize this himself, and after a few moments, moves over to sit beside her instead.

“I have been hearing news of happenings in Mana’Din’s lands,” Pride tells her, settling onto his stomach. “There is much unrest.”

“So far, in Mana’Din’s lands, there has been little _but_ unrest,” she wryly acknowledges.

“Is she truly such a poor leader?” the wolf wonders.

Ouch.

“Perhaps. She makes her attempts. But most of her people are still recovering from terrible things, too. There are those loyal to Falon’Din who resent her. And there are those who hate every evanuris. There are those who took on markings to escape the terrible conditions of their lives, but even so, resent being chained in service to the power they once resisted. And there are those who are unhappy that unmarked elves and former slaves have been awarded ranks and stations and rights as their equals. There are many reasons for all sorts of people to be unhappy with their situation,” she explains.

Pride tilts his head.

“Is that why you did not take on her markings?” he wonders. “You suffered too much to let yourself take them?”

“There are more reasons than just that for people not to take them,” she says. “In many ways, if you are forced to stay in a place, to do a certain thing, on pain of death, at least you can say to yourself ‘I am a prisoner, I have no choice’. If you give in, though, to try and achieve something better, then you also always have the knowledge that some part of you _agreed_ to your treatment. That you bowed your head and gave up a part of yourself. And every abuse, every bit of suffering you face, might seem insidiously like a compromise you have given up the right to protest against.”

Pride considers this. His graze drifts over the nearby pools, and the shimmering air. Some parts of the dreamscape are shifting. The ground sloping a bit, rearranging itself to accommodate a new pond or two. Knowledge is still quiet.

A dark-feathered bird rests in its shadow.

Knowledge has ratted her out, she suspects. By far the spirit’s worst habit.

“Are there many mistreatments of you?” the wolf wonders, concerned.

“I am lucky enough,” she assures him. “And what about you? How do you fare in Mythal’s lands?”

Pride perks up a bit at that.

“It is very peaceful,” he tells her. “Not even only compared to what I have learned of your home. I have been investigating matters of tactics and warfare, but there is little opportunity for firsthand experience where I am. Mythal has also encouraged me to study the rebellions of your lands. But I am learning poetry, and prose, and music, and other art forms, too. There is much to be inspired by in the palaces and gardens, and of course, in Arlathan itself.”

He hesitates a moment.

“Have you seen Arlathan?” he wonders.

“Yes,” she admits.

“There are many wonders within its walls,” Pride tells her anyway. “Though I often find myself thinking of the costs of some of them. June’s tower is a considerable investment of energies, to produce something only questionably worthwhile.”

“It is a hideous travesty,” she agrees.

He makes a little sound. A laugh that turns into a snort, and then a cough.

“I suppose Mana’Din cannot spare the resources for such endeavours yet. Do you fear that she might use you, or others like you, as tributes when the time comes that she can?” he asks her, serious and obviously a bit concerned.

“Is that what people think?” she wonders.

“Some,” Pride tells her.

She nearly asks who, and if Mythal is among them. But she doubts, by his tone, that he’d offer up any more details along those lines. And more likely, she thinks, these are the musings of other high-ranking subjects. Not evanuris themselves. Her family is… more aware of the general direction of her thoughts.

“Mana’Din will build no great monuments of blood and shattered spirits,” she says. “Whatever else might be said of her, she has little preoccupation with architecture.”

Pride looks away.

“Would you rather die than take on markings?” he asks. “I wear them. It is not bad at all.”

“How do you know?” she replies, and turns the notion back on him. “Was there ever a time before you had them? Do you never miss it, or what it meant to be free of their implications?”

His mouth opens, and then closes again. It takes him a moment to reply.

“I am Dreaming-born,” he admits. “To me the markings are not different than any other part of my body.”

Well. That is a… striking departure from Solas. But one which makes sense, she supposes, and fits with all the things she’s learned about this particular wolf.

Was he always like this, though, she wonders? Or did she change enough to inadvertently change him, too?

“Then think of them like taking on a body,” she suggests.

“The change is not so great,” he argues.

“In implications? Of course it is. You are giving up a part of yourself to become someone else. To serve someone else.”

Pride lowers his head, looking up at her from the soft, dark moss beneath them.

“Sometimes that is still better than the alternative,” he reasons.

She lets out a long breath.

“I know,” she admits.

After all, she had taken on Dirthamen’s markings. And long before that, she had debated over thoughts of her vallaslin. She would hardly judge any of the people in her lands who agreed to her own damn offer.

But she can hardly judge those who refused it, either.

They are quiet for a time. A contemplative silence that matches that of nearby Knowledge, and the dark-feathered  shape roosting in its shadow. She thinks of the Spirit of Contemplation she once found, deep below this part of the Dreaming. And of Peace, back in Sylaise’s service.

Slowly, she lifts a hand, and lowers it onto the head of the wolf beside her.

His fur is soft.

He glances at her. But after a moment, only lets out a breath, and closes his eyes.

“May I call you my friend?” he asks.

“Of course,” she says. Readily. Easily. As if it _is_ easy. But maybe it’s not so much easy as inevitable. She’s not going to turn from him.

She never could.

She wakes not long afterwards, with the feel of soft fur still tingling across her fingertips, and a sigh on her lips.


End file.
